Hugh, you, the fundamentalists, and the belligerent atheists all need to set aside these vulgar and cliched and distorted conceptions of God if we are going to get anywhere. There actually is a long tradition of Christian philosophy and theology that takes the question of God seriously. God is not a cloud being. Actually God is not a being at all, not an object you will come across in space and time. Here are some serious starting points. God is the source and fulness of being, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. All things depend on God for every moment of their existence. God is beyond our comprehension and yet closer to us than we are to ourselves. A good introduction to serious thinking about God in this tradition is David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God. For a more poetic and personal intro, try My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman. The experiences to which you were subjected as a child and as an adult--and I can say this unequivocally--do not represent this God.