Topic: Should it be ""God" or "god"?

[Paulhoff]

Even if X is not the X used now, since that is so long ago, no one in this country would know that. For a first world country, many in it are less than third world in their knowledge.

Paul

     

[Paulhoff]

Why don't I capitalize chirstians, because I am tried of hypocrites. As for xians, I am not here to account for everything written.

Paul

     

[Wonko the Sane]

So what about spelling it xians instead of Christians?

I have never heard that before. where is that from??

So, following the logic in this thread so far ... our sun should be called Sol only, and not the Sun, because it might somehow make our sun seem like it's more important than another sun, yes?  :wink:  

ABOSOLUTELY, it should be called Sol.

[Paulhoff]

Sol, sun, has long as it doesn't go away, I don't care.

Paul

     

[Wonko the Sane]

Sol, sun, has long as it doesn't go away, I don't care.

Paul

     

Nope it's not going anywhere, first it's going to expand into a red giant that will reach way past our orbit.

[Paulhoff]

I think they should bring back the killing of people with bad news.  :wink:

Paul

     

[DeadJerusalem]

So what about spelling it xians instead of Christians?

I do that all the time, but i usually have to explain it afterwards.

And somehow saying "deity dammit!" just doesnt quite have the same ring to it.

[Jaan]

Sol, sun, has long as it doesn't go away, I don't care.

Paul

     

Well that's the point of all those virgins sacrifices isn't it?  

[Paulhoff]

"virgins sacrifices"

Dumb bumb bumb, shows people with sexual repression.

Paul

     

[DeepGlue]

Sorry to zombie this thread, but I was thinking about this issue recently and wanted to see what people who've joined in the last three years have to say on this.

To me it all comes down to how capitalizing the word affects what god one is referring to. Obviously we in the West know "God" as referring generally to the Christian god, while "Allah" has the same meaning (?) in Arabic. Not ever having talked religion with Jews I'm not really familiar with when and how they use "God" vs. everything else to refer to their god.

So basically I'm wondering if "God" is really just the Christian name for their god, or if it's a "theft" of the word, which should properly refer to any god. I'm hoping it's the former because it's much easier to type and say "God" instead of "the Christian god."

[Leslie 417]

I always give a "god" unless I'm talking about a specific religions specific god.

ie/ Christians may think that god....

The pope thinks that God....

[AxeGrrl]

I seem to have fallen into the habit of doing this:

for those who think that 'God' is.......

I capitalize because it's grammatically correct, but use the quotation marks to...I don't know.....somehow suggest that this is a 'character' or a concept that is nebulous. 

(I think that's why I do it ~ I don't really know for sure since it's been an kind of unconscious habit of mine for awhile now)

[KarenX]

You capitalize God when you are referring specifically to the Christian god, and you lowercase it when it's just, well, a noun. It's like the difference between Earth and earth and, as people have pointed out, the Sun and sun. It just is. That's the way they decided to do proper nouns in English. Christians use the word god as a name for their god, so you write it God. Everyone knows what it means and to write it another way is unnecessarily confusing.

Putting it in quotes is just wrong. Sorry! It's my pet peeve to see quotes where they don't belong. Now that I've been abrasive, I'll be nicer. The Christian god is not a nebulous concept. I mean, it's got a million definitions that no one can agree exactly on, but when people who believe in a god are talking about that god, it's pretty clear what they mean. If you are setting up emphasis to make a comparison that's one thing: "Some people say that "God" is the comfort of a light breeze..." or if you wanted to indicate a category: "For those who believe that "God" is a collection of all the nice things in life..." That would be correct. But just throwing quotes around something to show that you think it's fictitious really isn't appropriate. Whatever you are putting in that sentence will probably get your point across. It would be like saying: "Hamlet" was a crazy loon who wasn't nearly good enough for "Ophelia."

Extra quotation marks are almost always just clutter that look like mistakes. It's very, very hard to make pointed statements with alternate punctuation.

So blah blah blah, what I meant to say was in response to this:

So basically I'm wondering if "God" is really just the Christian name for their god, or if it's a "theft" of the word, which should properly refer to any god. I'm hoping it's the former because it's much easier to type and say "God" instead of "the Christian god."

I think God is just the Christians' name for their god. It's translated the same in the romance languages that I know. I don't know what you mean by thefting the word; my hunch--worth nothing, probably--is that the lowercase, common noun god followed the Christian proper noun God. Once people caught on that not every culture believed in their actual God but rather something analogous, they stripped the word of it's special status with an ordinary version.

[Ole Eivind]

... my hunch--worth nothing, probably--is that the lowercase, common noun god followed the Christian proper noun God. Once people caught on that not every culture believed in their actual God but rather something analogous, they stripped the word of it's special status with an ordinary version.

Why would you think the word "god" has a Christian origin? It's not related to words from the languages the Christian scriptures were written in. It makes much more sense that Europeans got the word from the words they were already using for the other gods of the time, doesn't it?

From the wikipedia article on the word god:

The English word god continues the Old English god (guþ, gudis in Gothic, gud in modern Scandinavian, God in Dutch, and Gott in modern German), which derives from the Proto-Germanic *ǥuđán.

The Reverend Henry Scadding D.D. gives a similar etymology to God/god, from The Canadian Journal of Science and Literature and History, 1880 p.302, he writes;

“The same writer (Max Muller) says, “God was most likely an old heathen name of the Deity” Now we are acquainted with the old heathen names of the Deity among the northern peoples who make use of this word; and the nearest to it of these names is that of the Lombard and Westphalia Guodan. ...

[AxeGrrl]

Putting it in quotes is just wrong. Sorry! It's my pet peeve to see quotes where they don't belong. Now that I've been abrasive, I'll be nicer. The Christian god is not a nebulous concept. I mean, it's got a million definitions that no one can agree exactly on, but when people who believe in a god are talking about that god, it's pretty clear what they mean.

I appreciate your almost instinctual rejection of the quotation marks Karen (saying this as a recovering grammar nazi myself:), but I don't agree that something that has "a million definitions that no one can agree exactly on" isn't a nebulous concept.  Yes, even if we're talking about the Christian concept.