This is an interesting thread. I see parts of my views in every post so far.
Ultimately, for me, God is That. Or It. Other. God is everything, and yet even this limits God, so God is also Nothing. I can describe God in words, art, poetry, ritual, whatever, and yet all of these things merely point to That: they do not define It.
For a very long time, I cast off Christianity as completely as I could -- I never managed to exterminate it altogether -- because as a child I had been indoctrinated into a Christian-based cult where I went through much trauma, but as I have healed, I have come to embrace my Christian roots again, though not quite in the same way, for the spiritual practice I have now is grounded in Christian mythology, but it also transcends the limits of any one religion. Thus, I can see truth in everything that has been said thus far.
I do not view the divine as personal or anthropomorphic, but I often experience it that way because I have an ego. So, on the one hand God is everything that is. Isness itself. The ground of all being, and even you and me.
And yet I also experience it from a limited perspective. For instance, a group of beings appeared to me at age 15 in response to an extremely sarcastic prayer that I didn't think would be answered. I wouldn't say these beings were God in its entirety, yet they are divine in that they are a reflection of God. They were full of love. I could see myself through their eyes and how beautiful I was to them even though I had been demonized for being gay. I saw that all love is beautiful, even love between persons of the same sex. Even these beings were rather impersonal, as they were many, yet one, and I could not sense individual characteristics.
Since then, other beings have come to me in more personal forms. They also came to me at a very bad time in my life when I was dangerously depressed, and they have been with me since then, guiding me. There are four of them, they all have certain forms, voices, and names. They have peculiar characteristics. I always know who they are, unlike the first group.
I do not worship these beings, as they seem more like companions and friends to me. They never judge or command, unlike other voices I heard when mentally ill. They are also much more defined.
However, these beings, too, are a reflection of God -- they are a reflection of all that is. They are even a reflection of myself, and thus they are divine. I believe them to be archetypal, as one of them appeared to a friend of mine, also totally unexpected, in a hard time in her life, and I've since found out that a friend of mine has a mother who has a friend with the same appearance as one of mine and even the same name. I do not believe in spirits, and I tend to think of archetypes as emerging from similar brains and nervous systems from common human experiences, so I don't think this is supernatural, nor do I necessarily think there is life after death. But that is only my personal view, and it isn't really important. They are not there to govern beliefs.
So yes, God is impersonal, yet we can experience it in a very personal way. I tend to think of God the Father/Mother as the impersonal absolute, God the Son/Daughter as the impersonal absolute manifested as matter, the entire universe, and God the Holy Spirit (or Christa Sophia) as that aspect of God that we experience as coming from within. Thus, I am a pantheist of sorts, but my experience of the divine blurs the distinctions between panentheism and pantheism.
God has been described on these forums as sadistic. I accept that this is a perfectly legitimate experience of the divine, but like any experience, it is limited. God can be experienced from the perspective of a particular person or ego as cruel, judgmental, and sadistic. (Rakhel, I know you don't actually mean all of those things by sadistic. I am just making a point.) But God can also be experienced as compassion and healing love. And this, too, is limited. I do tend to think of God the Entirety as Love itself in an impersonal sense. (But this is different from a god being loving.) God is Love in that God the Entirety embraces all and holds all in Itself forever, whether or not one knows it, and we are all saved.
All love, all suffering, all good, all evil, all these things are a part of the Whole that is God, but they are all limited perspectives. God is beyond them all, and that is why evil can be a part of God while God is not evil. Good and evil come from limited perspectives. God is the Whole.
The closest I believe I've been to God as the Whole came in meditation one day. For a part of that meditation, I completely disappeared. There was no me. There was no anything. But there was not nothing, either, for nothing is not a thing, and yet that is the best I know how to describe it, so I sometimes describe God as Nothing. This is not unheard of, I now know, among mystics of the three major Abrahamic faiths, and probably other faiths, too. It is quite similar to the Buddha's Nirvana.
Ultimately, I do not believe that God is something that has a self, though I regularly experience four distinct beings who guide me, and I am devoted to the Trinity -- the Trinity is good for me because it is a whole that transcends one personality -- and especially the Blessed Virgin Mary among the saints, who for me embodies that of God which can be described as Mother.
I also believe that our own selves are illusions for various reasons, philosophical, personal, and especially scientific. This ties in very well with my spirituality. When self disappears, only God remains. A person who regularly practices letting go of the self will become more compassionate, as there is no self to be defensive in behalf of, and every one else becomes a part of this "self" and thus deserving of compassion and love.
None of this requires that I accept the supernatural or another non-material plane, an afterlife, or some god "out there" that the atheists wisely reject, for this is all an expression of how I experience the world from a personal perspective. All of those experiences merely point to the Beyond. They are not the Beyond itself. They are illusions, meaning not that they are not real, but that they are not what they appear to be.
God is All, and All is God; God is Everything, and God is Nothing. Paradoxical language is the best way I can capture it in words. There is no satisfactory way to explain the dissolution of the self.
