Very much so, yes.
Okay... so what does god value... what qualities does she have?
As I said, the specifics vary from person to person, and especially from culture to culture. Just like what I think "America" is is going to differ from what a White Supremicist is going to think. It can also be modified as the culture changes or as it crosses cultural boundaries. The Jesus of the Christian is not the Jesus of the Muslim.
Another quality it has is is universiality. Every single culture has come up with a "god" to worship.
It is a collective, corporate entity. While it exists as a product of the human "mind", but is not bound to any one particular individual. The more people that have it in mind, the stronger, the more vital it is. It encourages those that participate in it to transmit it to others.
It "lives" in the books, the art, the temples that are dedicated to it, insofar as these artifacts bring the god to mind. It causes those that "follow" it to create these artifacts to preserve it.
In exchange for this, it provides its faithful with many blessings- a sense of purpose to a purposeless existance, a sense of signifigance in an uncaring, impersonal universe, a feeling of stability against a chaotic, unknowable future. Something for a tribeless primate evolved to live in packs it no longer easily forms on simple kinship lines with which to identify.
When it is completely forgotten, it dies.
I'm sure there's more, but that's what comes to mind immediately.
Does she interfer with physcis in order to answer prayers?
No. But sometimes people will modify their behaviour in order to effect what they see as its will.
What is her nature and what does she look like?
It depends on who you ask. To a Christian, it's going to be a kind, compassionate man with stringy hair, a ragged beard, a dirty robe and sandals. To a Hindu, one of several dozen well-defined dieties, from elephant-headed Ganesh to Krishna to Brahma the sleeping lord of creation. To some of the Mesoamericans, it was Tlaloc the crocodile-headed god of rain, or Coatlicue, the serpent mother that devours her own children. To the Chinese, it was their ancestors; to the animist, the spirits that exist within every single thing, from rocks and plants and rivers to cell phones and cars.
Usually when I try to pin people down on this, they get defensive or oblique.
Well, you might be asking the wrong people then.
Who here has answered those kind of questions? Usually believers just want to tell non-believers how arrogant they are not to believe in (insert nebulous entity that they call "god")
You have to understand that for a lot of people they have never questioned the nature of their god, and never met anyone who has before. It's a bit like learning about what your parents were like as unruly children, or finding out some of the unpleasant things your nation has done in the past that your gradeschool teacher never mentioned, IMO. Learning that not everyone shares your unique world view is a hard pill to swallow at first.
Then there is a bit of having to explain what "red" is to the blind man. Who can immediately describe something which thusfar has been plainly obvious to eveyone else they've ever known?
America exists and will have existed whether people are "believing in it" or not. The same is not true of any gods.
Oh? Did Jesus evaporate in a puff of logic, absent from everyone's mind when you became an atheist? It exists as long as it isn't forgotten. Same goes for America.
What did the tribes of Neanderthals call themselves? What nations might they have formed? They don't exist, they are forgotten. One day, I guarantee, America will be too. On that day, when all evidence is gone, America will have never existed.
