I get it – you’re an atheist. You should still capitalize “God” | Hacker News Reader

I get it – you’re an atheist. You should still capitalize “God”

salon.com

17 pointsmiles33 comments

Naming your god vaguely as "God" is the fault of the authors of the Bible. Also, is it The Bible, the Bible, or the bible? Stop applying your religious conviction to my method of dictation. Name your god something more namelike. Like Steve. Then I'll know to capitalize it.

If I named my kid "Person", the fault would be on me when people keep writing "person" to address him.

Well, to be fair, it wasn't the authors of the Bible. AFAIK, the word for God in ancient Hebrew doesn't directly translate to God in English. I think in the original language God's name is a more specific name than it is in English (YHWH). From Wikipedia on "Names of God in Judaism":

The name of God most often used in the Hebrew Bible is the Tetragrammaton (YHWH יהוה‬). It is frequently anglicized as Jehovah and Yahweh and written in most English editions of the Bible as "the Lord" owing to the Jewish tradition increasingly viewing the divine name as too sacred to be uttered. It was thus replaced vocally in the synagogue ritual by the Hebrew word Adonai (“My Lords”), which was translated as Kyrios (“Lord”) in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures.[1]

> If I named my kid "Person", the fault would be on me when people keep writing "person" to address him.

That would be silly of you, but it would still be obvious bad grammar. Proper names get capitalized in English. It's pretty simple.

Bad grammar, sure. I'd argue against it being "obvious" bad grammar. In most use cases, the word person is not meant to be capitalized.

You know whether you're writing a proper name or not. No one has trouble capitalizing Peg or Cat or Amber when they're people's names.

There are no capital letters in Hebrew, and when the NT was written, it was written in all caps, or rather, uncials. Lower case came much later with the miniscules, and even when it did, the name of God was not capitalized, nor were any other names.

> Like Steve.

A more likely name would be 张伟, because most people are Chinese, after all.

张伟 -> Zhang Wei. Any shared roots with Yahweh? Or am I butchering etymology here?

> If you are referring to the singular and all-powerful deity of monotheistic tradition, you are using a proper name. That means the capital “G” is a must.

The problem IMO is that at least in English, "god" is simply too widely-used and inexactly-defined. Certain religions don't have any exclusive claim to the word; it isn't unique enough. So I'm not convinced of this argument. I'll spell it how I want, because in my mind the concept of "god" is intractable and has no well-defined meaning to begin with, so it can't be a proper noun.

Many people being raised today do not even realize there is any significance in the capitalization. I personally don't see any significance in the capitalization, as a christian god has just as much weight as any other deity. Instead of attributing the lack of capitalization to some intent of the person using the word, the author of this article should attribute it to indifference instead.

Do you not see the significance of the capital "C" in "Christian" either?

I find it as typographically awkward as if you put Chinese person in that response. It's a whole chunk of lower case and what does someone choose to pull my attention to? The C in Chinese? And every mention must do that? For sake of orthodoxy.

When someone underuses a typographic convention I find it suddenly more powerful.

Do I understand you to say that sometimes you use "Chinese" but you also sometimes use "chinese"?

For non-casual conversation, I generally write to the audience, which varies in how I rate their valuing of these kinds of language conventions. When I'm writing to myself I consider my own ergonomics.

So if one's mother purchased many jars of preserved fruits like apricots, pineapples, or chinese plums, the use of capitalization wouldn't be as noisy.

Maybe one day we'll just all use a language formatting tool for different kinds of public communication.

It's more about bad grammar than anything else, to me. Proper names should be capitalized. You wouldn't type "zeus" or "thor."

If you're talking about the concept of gods, then lowercase is fine, and the article mentions that.

It's the internet, this is the place where languages go to die. You can try to get people to follow grammar rules, but they'll probably just rotflmao ;).

Some cases are pretty clear, but the first example used feels off. Someone saying "so help me god" doesn't yet make it entirely clear if they are beseeching Abrahamic monotheistic God, or their specific alternative entity by title. Assuming the former might be tradition, but it seems perfectly valid to go with the latter since it it is more inclusive.

In my native language, a person's name must be capitalized. "Hello, Fred!" While for a title, it depends on the title, and no noun is capitalized. "She's the Queen" "He's the foreman" It just boils down to: is god's name God or it is just the noun we use to describe him, or his title?

I look at it as the same thing as "mom" vs "Mom". When someone is referring to their own mother, as in "I'm going to tell Mom", then it is capitalized. Vs "I'm going to tell your mom".

But if I say "Help me, mom!" I could be referring to her by title, and that title might not even be unique since one could have multiple moms. In that case, the ambiguity makes me feel like the lowercase should be preferred for its broader applicability, unless trying to make some point.

Good analogy.

How about using $DEITY?

Counterpoint: the accepted biblical English translation of the name of god is "the Lᴏʀᴅ" or "Gᴏᴅ". Don't faff about at the half-way mark.

[Poe's law status: satire with an smidgen of pedant]

The all caps indicates (in the OT) that the word used for God was the tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters from which we get Jehovah in English. There is at least one other common name for God in Hebrew which is not capitalized when transliterated.

Or maybe people just don't care as much as the author assumes.

I am not an atheist but I am not a Christianity-believer either. You should let me live my life and not correct how I write.

Peace?

That is the problem when you have a god called God. Are we calling it by name, attribute or reference?

Edwin Lyngar, who seems to be a good guy, employs it in an otherwise excellent piece about the aggressive Christianization of our armed forces.

I agree that if you are, in fact, referencing the god of Christian tradition, as is the case in the passage mentioned, it should be capitalized. However, I routinely use lower case god precisely because I want to make it clear I'm absolutely not referencing Christianity. It's merely shorthand for "Whatever intelligence is behind the workings of the universe" and isn't really intended to support monotheism, which I don't particularly believe in.

I grew up in The Bible Belt. I have some familiarity with Christianity. I generally try to be respectful of Christians. Most are no better than anyone else, but I've met a few very sincere Christians who impressed me. I try hard to not be disrespectful of their beliefs.

To my mind, my use of lower case god is in line with that. When I'm talking about my thoughts and my feelings, I'm not talking about Christianity. I feel that capitalizing it while also grumpily saying things like "the asshole in charge of the universe" would be more disrespectful, not less. It would suggest that I'm cussing at their deity, when that isn't my intent.

I've had a lot of hardships. My life still sucks. I remain dirt poor, socially isolated, etc. I'm frequently cranky as hell about it. I feel like the universe is a shitty place, full of shitty people and whatever asshole runs this place should be smacked upside the head.

I'm not interested in tangling with Christians who feel I'm talking trash about their deity when I'm not. I'm just saying my life sucks and if there is some all knowing, all powerful being out there, he, she or it is seriously giving me a raw deal and I'm not happy about it.

I seriously don't want some Christian getting all up in my business about my kvetching in part because I know my response to that would be "If you are so good hearted and devoted to helping the sick and poor, why don't you do a fundraiser for me so my life can suck less, you hypocritical asshat. Oh, wait, you won't. Because you aren't actually in church to get moral instruction. You're there so you have bragging rights on virtue signaling." And that's absolutely not going to go anyplace good.

(I probably wouldn't outright call them a hypocritical asshat to their face. I would just think it.)

When I mean the Christian deity, I do capitalize it. Or I try to. I have health issues and Swiss cheese for brains, so I make plenty of typoes and other errors. But I mostly don't capitalize god because I'm specifically trying to make it clear in most cases "I don't mean your God, so stay off my back, thanks."

/Another take on this.

Wasn't God always referred to The Lord or YHVH in the original Bible anyway?

Hmmm autocorrect automatically capitalizes Bible but not god.

Capitalizing "The", is religious conviction. Maybe We Should Capitalize Every First Letter In A Sentence That Includes "God" For Fear That He Might Smite Us.

The Bible is the name of a specific book, not a generic term. Autocorrecting that would be grammatically correct

I don't get the argument at all "Harry Potter" is also capitalized, and of course should you believe, the name is also capitalized. So is not capitalizing it anything but disrespecting other's beliefs ?

> So is not capitalizing it anything but disrespecting other's beliefs ?

Could just be poor grammar. It's not entirely unheard of on the Internet.

Weird reading this from a liberal news website. I agree, but still weird.

It's weird to me for its defense of prescriptive grammar. Right and wrong grammar are made up and a social construct after all.

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