community, advice, societyAs a non-believer am I required to write “God” or can I get away with “god?” If I do not believe God is real, and consequently not a proper noun, I shouldn’t have to write “God,” right?
MLA Rules for capitalizing the word "god", per the University of Purdue:
The names of God, specific deities, religious figures, and holy books
God the Father
the Greek gods
Moses
Shiva
Buddha
Zeus
Exception: Do not capitalize the nonspecific use of the word "god." [i.e.] The word "polytheistic" means the worship of more than one god.
In other words, for professional or academic work, when referring to that god Yahweh with the word god, he's properly referred to as God. Capitalized. Same as Buddha and Vishnu. For further background, the etymology of the term "God" is pretty interesting:
The earliest written form of the Germanic word god comes from the 6th century Christian Codex Argenteus. The English word itself is derived from the Proto-Germanic * ǥuđan...
...The capitalized form God was first used in Ulfilas's Gothic translation of the New Testament, to represent the Greek Theos. In the English language, the capitalization continues to represent a distinction between monotheistic "God" and "gods" in polytheism.[6][7] In spite of significant differences between religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, the Bahá'í Faith, and Judaism, the term "God" remains an English translation common to all. The name may signify any related or similar monotheistic deities, such as the early monotheism of Akhenaten and Zoroastrianism.
When used in English within a community with a common monotheistic background, "God" always refers to the deity they share. Those with a background in different Abrahamic religions will usually agree on the deity they share, while still differing on details of belief and doctrine—they will disagree about attributes of [the] God, rather than thinking in terms of "my God" and "your (different) God".
Do you capitalize Harry Potter? Do you capitalize Narnia? Are they real? Well, then, should you capitalize God, if that’s the standard?
Grammatically, “God” is correct if you’re speaking english and referring to the Christian god. In that particular case, it’s a proper name, and those rules of capitalization apply.
If you’re speaking generically about divine beings, you can use “god” because that is just a regular noun usage.
Some people will get offended if you refer to “Big G” God with a lower case “g”.
I’ve never heard of god complaining about grammar.
I usually refer to “the”, “their”, “your”, “a” etc. “god”. I do not capitalize.
Depends on who you want to communicate with. Typically, you don’t want to get into arguments about capitalization if you’re trying to make other people understand you.
There’s an interesting historical / logistical point to be made about this question. If you were Jewish, you’d be spelling it “G-d”. I don’t know where, in the point of Christian history, they decided it was acceptable to write the letter ‘o’ in there (although I’m sure it pre-dates the conversion of the English-speaking peoples…). So whether you’re making a conscious decision to do it or not (and since it’s the same god), you’re already defying a convention on one level by writing “God” or “god”. Lower case is just another act of convention-defiance.
An argument can be made for the capitalization of the name because we capitalize the names of other fictional characters, from Lyra Belacqua to Ford Prefect and so on and so forth. I can only speak for myself, rather than other atheists when I say this, but I consciously write “god” because it is an act of defiance against that which I was taught (which, in full fairness as I was raised Jewish, is a twofold act of defiance…)
As a proper noun, where “God” is the name of the god, then yes, it should be capitalized. It’s a little uncertain as he has many names, depending on religion (Zeus, Ra, etc.) but whenever it’s used as a proper name to refer to whatever god you’re referring to, capitalization follows just as if you were referring to Bob.
That said, I take objection to the further capitalization of pronouns referring to a god:
“And then God made the internet, and He saw that it was good.”
In that example, “he” should not be capitalized, but some people might object, citing that the pronoun refers to God and therefore should also be capitalized. When you talk about Bob, you don’t capitalize pronouns referring to him unless they appear at the beginning of a sentence.
Why would someone suggest that the pronoun be capitalized? A form of respect? I doubt that if God existed he’d care about such novelty.
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