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I hope I'm not stepping out of line by commenting without really knowing where your chapter takes the idea, but I did want to throw in a perspective that probably departs from your own, just for the sake of stimulating discussion.

garicker: In this chapter I detail some of the difficulties in discussing concepts of gods: the absence of clear definitions, the tremendous number of notions -- many of them mutually exclusive -- about the nature of a god...

By way of extending your point, the fact of the matter is that most religions developed in contexts that were significantly isolated from one another, not only geographically but also in terms of what concerned the communities involved. There was some exchange of ideas, and the similarities that seem to arise across the board argue a common origin for a lot of the concepts basic to religion, but the description of a body of cultural facts as "religion" is ultimately a form of shorthand that can distort the fact that those facts aren't always as synonymous as we'd like. Just to give a really basic example, the Shinto notion of kami is superficially similar to the Western idea of gods, enough so that Western commentators have often translated kami as gods and applied the same standards of critique, but the more you deal with the specifics of Shinto religion and Japanese culture, the more that similarity breaks down. Ultimately, kami cannot be assimilated to gods in the Western sense of that term.

The application of the term "religion" to a great many Asiatic traditions is, in fact, problematic, not because those traditions don't aspire to as much dignity as you would or would not accord a Western tradition, but because the concept of religion, rooted as it is in the Latin-Christian scholastic tradition, carries a lot of biases and presuppositions that just aren't entirely germaine to everything that we call religion. There's a polemical angle to that, in that European conquerers of the age of Reconnaisance employed those biases as a critique of the cultures they set about conquering -- there were presumably so backwards that their religious institutions had never reached a level of completion native to European Christendom. European Catholicism, Judaism and Islam exhibit a level of organization and orthodoxy that is, on the whole, uncharacteristic of religions as a whole, and the primacy of our familiarity with those traditions has conditioned our responses to everything we place under the heading of religion, despite the fluidity that seems to arise quite naturally in religions traditions that have evolved along different lines.

As you've mentioned here, that leads to some problems when it comes time to talk about religion as a general phenomenon. And it seems to me that most American and European critics of religion have, on the whole, swallowed whole the presuppositions of Eurocentric definitions of religion. That isn't to say that they'd be any more kindly disposed to religion if they had a less Eurocentric understanding, or a wider and more in-depth familiarity with non-Western religious traditions, but I do think it likely that it would lead to some significant changes in the way they discuss religion, even if only to oppose it.

... and the lack of critical thinking on the part of many believers who claim to "know" a god exists.

This arises, in a great many cases, I think, because the motivations behind certain kinds of belief are not so uniform as we often suspect. Just as a for instance, I've read a lot of material about the Creationist debate, and most critics of Creationism seem to take it for granted that Creationists want from their cosmology the same thing that Evolutionists want from theirs: ie. a practical, plausible explanation of natural phenomenon. But it doesn't seem at all likely that Creationists have taken their side of the case for anything like that reason. For a lot of Creationists, I think moral concern is at root in their opposition to Darwinian evolution; and the matter is often complicated by their commitment to certain forms of status quo, like patriarchical social organization and the need to justify economic and social disparity levelled against minorities. If a person's objection to a scientific theory is premised on something other than technical interest or the practical application of knowledge about the natural world, then they're not likely to employ the same standards of critical thought, or if they do employ critical thought, they're likely to do it in conflicting ways.

garicker: It also is true within the various religious traditions themselves. For example, Christians come in all shapes and sizes. So much so that one must spend some time exploring what an individual believer means by the designation.

Mmhmm. In some ways, it took me a while to really cut through the assumption that religion as a phenomenon was internally consistent and recognize that it may be more honest to recognize innovation and variation as natural phenomenon in religious development. It took a massive amount of work for medieval Catholicism to develop, disseminate and ultimately enforce a consistent orthodoxy; ultimately, the papacy and scholastics had to work against a natural tendency to take an idea and run with it. The history of heresy is basically one long testament to that fact.

Until someone fills in the blanks, the word "God" is, for all practical intents and purposes, empty of any clear meaning.

I don't know if I'd go that far. I think context is important in discussion of just about any topic, and while variation does make religious terminology difficult to compass, the same can be said of a lot of ideas that we generally treat as solid and stable. In social situations we interact with the presumption that everyone is using language in roughly congruent ways, but the deeper we dig in any given discussion, the more likely I think we are to find serious disparities in the way people both understand and employ the words they use to communicate. So I don't think the problematics of talking about God render it meaningless.