Comfort zones

I read this story on the BBC today about a Dutch cleric who runs a Protestant church in central Holland but is not actually a Christian. When you read his account of how that works he does what a lot of religious people do; in fact most I talk to do this to some extent they redefine the core concepts of religion like "God" to suit their own perception or situation. To the Rev Klaas Hendrikse "God" is just a word that means "Human experience", rather like the Deists of old (e.g. Hume, Paine, Jefferson, Einstein etc,) his is an Einsteinian view of "God", i.e. God is not an entity that exists or impacts on our lives it's just a word that means something beyond our complete comprehension or simply all encompassing like "God is nature" or "God is love"

I have some sympathy for this viewpoint it's useful to have labels for things that places them into some kind of intellectual comfort zone; after all there are plenty of things we don't understand and plenty of things that overwhelm our senses. Life is awesome and terrifying in many ways however looking at it rationally I don't really see that hijacking words so overloaded with meaning from history particularly adds much value, the process explains nothing. The Atheistic viewpoint seems to me to be more honest than the Deistic one, to simply admit, we don't know something rather than redefine words like "God" so that we make sure they're all being used for something seems pointless to me, if God is nature then why not just say "nature" and avoid all the confusion?