I am a filmmaker by trade (and one in real life too! lol) so I am very intimate with not only suspension of disbelief (temporarily allow oneself to believe something that isn't true, especially in order to enjoy a work of fiction) but how to accomplish this state of mind with an audience.

This being stated, in the motion picture community we refer to 'flicker frquency' or the rate at which still pictures pass in front of our eyes and our brains interpret the content of the pictures as being in motion.

This is important because, it demonstrates that our brains don't like 'missing' information. So much so, that our brains will actually fill in missing pices of information to create comprehension. Our entire big brain evolution as homo sapien sapiens is centered around pattern recognition; celestial bodies for agriculture to hypothesis for the scientific method, all pattern recognition.

So anytime we encounter 'missing' information it is in our nature to fill in the gaps, if for nothing else to psychologically satiate a physiological need to do so. Gaps in information cause physiological as well as psychological stresses. So the same way we can imagine theories into being by testing them and retesting them, we can imagine ideas into being to explain all those pesky 'gaps' in information while we try to figure out how things work...and wallah, deities.

Our species has three needs (food, sex, security) and three motivators (money, power, prestige). A very long time ago some not-so-terribly-ingenious person figured out s/he could have all his/her needs met and most of their motivators satiated by doing one simple thing; claiming to know things no one could possibly know. Now we start to have orginized religions, cults, tribes, however you wan to define them, because if there are people who know things that can't be known, having this knowledge is only as good as having others to believe this person knows things that can't be known.

To me, a god/s is a philosophical abstract idea that allows one or a group to meet his/hertheir needs and satiate his/her/their motivators by claiming to have knowledge of things that can't be known.

I believe God to be nothing more than a metaphor for the mysteries of life…everything science has not yet explained.
All deities throughout history are just metaphors for the energies that control the body that we have no control over…Love, hate, rage, jealousy, joy etc…Roman, Greek, Hindu Gods can all be seen as metaphors for these energies.

There are only about 4,000 gods or dieties worshipped on this planet. Pick one, I'm sure you'll pick the real one and all the rest will be fakes.

It's whatever you say it is.

God is the fiction that people create to try to explain the world around them when they do not have science to explain it for them.
ie
I am the smartest, strongest thing here so who would be able to control the weather, sun, moon but something like me but bigger and stronger and smarter.
Who could make bad things happen but a bigger, stronger, smarter me but not as strong and smart as the good one because more good happens than bad.

A lot of good answers and some funny ones. A god is a made up entity to fulfill a need and a roll and is augmented until it is accepted into a culture.

I like how NonStampCollector describes god. God is "The thing that made the things for which there is no known maker, and that causes and directs the events that we can't otherwise explain, and doesn't need to have been made, and is the one thing from which you can ask for things that no human can give, and without whom we can't be fully happy, and is unlimited by all the laws of physics, and never began and will never finish, and who is invisible but actually everywhere at once, and who is so perfect that even if he killed millions of people including babies he'd still be perfect, and who is so powerful and magical he could even make a virgin pregnant if he wanted to, wants to be thanked for what he is, and would really appreciate if you would kill some livestock, splash the blood around onto things and then burn the carcasses so he can enjoy the smell."

The late Dave Allen on Religon and God

Since gods are complete fabrications of the human imagination, they can be almost anything... a thunderstorm or springtime or a mountain or the entire universe or some bearded wizard in the sky. It's like asking "what is a giant?" or "what is an elf?". The answers can vary so widely that it would be difficult to have an exacting definition.

Mkay. That's my 2 cents.

I found research conducted by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago enlightening in addressing this sort of question. Two links about the same subject:
[newscientist.com]
[news.uchicago.edu]

In short, Epley found that our own conception of what God believes and expects from an individual and others is closely tied to what the individual thinks and feels. When the opinion of the individual changes, so does their belief of what their God expects of them. It would appear as if God is a projection of the individual externalized perhaps into another form. If any God(s) exist independently of this dynamic, the human understanding of God(s) is apparently is none the less tied to it.

A product of the imagination.

I never believed in an invisible being that resides somewhere beyond the clouds.

I don't care about the differences. All are made-up to control people.

This is the reason that many atheists who debate theism expect an established definition of, and list of criteria for, a god prior to a debate. If we don't, that goalpost keeps moving. Anything that can have an ambiguous meaning and can't be fact checked needs to be treated this way. This is also why I reject ant statement containing the words "spiritual" or "spirituality." Too ambiguous.

I honestly don't care about the distinctions. They're all man-made, and none of them exist. They're all meant as a means of control, and almost always based in fear.

God is a word for the personification of things that don't exist or that we can't prove exist, it is therefore meaningless, and may be used for anything you wish, as long as you think of it as personified.

Spiritual, is a word for any emotion which we can not fully, or can not yet, rationalize.

Neither word leads anywhere, or moves any thought forwards.

To me bacon cheeseburgers are quite godly!!?!

Variability due to the vagaries of the Human Imagination. Apart from being usually an old man, the variability of image of the "one" god are perhaps due to not wishing to upset the earthly elders of any religion or indeed any other god.