The Judeo-Christian god is also totally, in its own way, a product of its culture. Every god is.
We're back to special pleading again. I always come back to the same question - why your god and not someone else's god? To claim that it's all part of some great supernatural force and that they are all the same thing really is intellectually bankrupt as an argument, and anyway it totally contradicts all the stuff nooks has cited above about the various ways in which they are all different.
I've just googled Ward and he is an ordained priest. Forgive me, but isn't that a bit like reading "Why Burgers Are Great" written by a senior manager at McDonald's? Is there no objective Theology For Dummies?
It's funny how people find Dawkins cheap and nasty when interviewing people. True, he is sharp, and doesn't brook any waffle, but that's not the same as being rude. He occasionally gets irritated, true, but wouldn't you? FFS, you'd need the patience of a saint not to when you put up with people throwing that much half-baked, ill-thought-out, irrational piffle at you all the time. I've seen him interviewing religious people and he affords them just as much - and as little - opportunity to put their theories and their evidence in front of him as he would any of his scientific colleagues. That's not just polite - that's something he simply does not have to do, and yet he does. In this sense, he is tolerant.
Threadworm, colour is a bad example because there is a clear, simple, scientific explanation for it. It may not have been within the knowledge of our forebears, but so what? There are plenty of things science doesn't currently understand, but it it strives to. If 19th-century learning had just accepted that colour was "beyond human understanding" and in the realm of the "spiritual", we'd never have had the writings on the subject by Goethe, Maxwell and others who have helped us to understand it.
AMum, I rather thought that was what you were driving at so thank you for clarifying it. We are speaking totally different languages, and that is the problem I have here with Threadworm and others. The terms people use on here are just not clearly defined enough - they can mean whatever they want them to mean, and this is somehow evidence of an extraordinarily "sophisticated" approach to faith which I would immediately understand if I went and read some theology. Forgive me for being a little cynical.