this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024

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God should never be a proper noun (medium.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/atheism

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

While I am not personally an atheist, this was the only religion-centered community I could find to post this article, and surely we polytheists and atheists can find a united purpose in condemning monotheistic bias.

top 11 comments

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[–] FlyingSquid 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When talking specifically about the god of the Christians and Jews, "God" is a proper noun. You can say it's a nickname, but nicknames are proper nouns. Even if you just go with the names for that god in the bible, he's given a lot more than one and a lot of them are just a variation on a word like 'lord' anyway. So it's one of his names. There are centuries of precedent to back that up and that's just how language works. You can think of it as someone with the name Guy. I even had a teacher in school who's first name was Lady.

Now that doesn't mean when you eat a great meal and say, "god damn that was good!" or even if you say something like, "I hope to god we win" you need to capitalize it, because if you're in this community, that's probably not the god you're referring to.

This would be proper usage: "Jesus said that God will punish the unbelievers." Incidentally, this can also be avoided with a pronoun: "Jesus said that his god will punish the unbelievers." But it is still proper to capitalize it when talking about that deity in specific.

Now capitalizing 'he' when discussing that god, no excuse there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm a bit unclear on precisely what you mean by your last sentence. But if you mean that the pronouns of any god should never be capitalised, and that your mind can't be changed on this issue, then I'm going to have to ask you never to reply to Me again. I use capitalised pronouns, and I have no time to argue about My pronouns with people who will never change their minds.

[–] FlyingSquid 1 points 5 days ago

I stopped worshipping you as a god years ago. Do I keep needing to remind you?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I only capitalize god when referring specially to the Christian god, because it's basically also his name. Same with "The Lord." It's capitalized because it's being used as a proper noun to refer to a singular entity.

Just because the character is fictional doesn't mean you stop using their names and titles like a proper noun when referring to the character.

[–] K1nsey6 1 points 1 week ago

'God' is not their actual name. The deity goes be several names in the bible, none of which are 'God'

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Biblically speaking, the true name of the lord is unknown to humans. "God" is just a nickname. And as My article argues, we shouldn't use that nickname, we should find a more neutral and polite nickname to use.

[–] FlyingSquid 3 points 1 week ago

I can't really think of a more neutral nickname for a god than 'God.' What would you suggest?

As for politeness, I would think the polite thing to do would be to call the god by the name that the believers call it. Whether or not you wish to be polite about that is another matter.

More to the point though, the purpose of language is to be understood. If you use some word when speaking English that Christians and Jews generally use when speaking English, you'll be more easily understood. People misuse words like "theory" and "organic" all the time, but most people understand what they're talking about anyway. Which is important.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Isn't it Yaweh?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 week ago

Yahweh is just an old Hebrew word for "god", but it's a lot better than saying "God" in English, because it's specific. It places the word within an appropriate cultural context and doesn't carry the same subtext in English. Nobody today believes in another Yahweh, so it isn't stepping on anyone's toes. It's a much better nickname.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

I have never capitalized it unless it starts a sentence. If anyone has looked at human history, there has never been "the god". The christian god is just one more on the stack of hundreds of thousands of gods over the years. Hijacking such a simple word probably does help play into the mind-fuck though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I wonder what would happen if English made like German and just made all nouns start with an majescule. LORD and Lord actually represent two different things in the source materials, so it wouldn't make sense necessarily to go all caps in, say, the KJV