That's _Lord_ God to you, buddy

I've been gulping down large sections of a "philosophy of religion" taped lecture series, and I've been enjoying it very much. The course focuses on the philosophical questions of ethical monotheism, i.e. "Is there a God?"

I'm no stranger to many of the arguments for the existence of God, but one thing that surprised me was the fact that we had to go back and define what, exactly, we meant by God. It only shows how emeshed I am in the culture that it didn't occur to me at first that it needed to be defined. Moreover, some aspects of the definition surprised me. You would expect God to be perfect: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and of infinite goodness. But tack on to that one more property: God must be deserving of worship, or else he doesn't deserve to be called God. And that struck me as well -- "God" as we typically understand the word is a title, not merely a person. I can almost imagine the personals listing: "Seeking: Deity. Must be all-seeing, all-knowing, infinitely loving, and deserving of wonder and awe. No smokers."