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.

  • Flying Squid
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    149 days ago

    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.

    • Grail (capitalised)OP
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      26 days ago

      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.

      • Flying Squid
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        16 days ago

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