Exactly. One may think of YHVH as a symbol - a sigil, a glyph - consisting of four Hebrew letters, representing the concept of “God”.
So God is like Prince, using an unpronounceable symbol for his name?
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6)
If you believe the stories about the wealth of the Vatican, I guess God is very well capitalized …
Grammatically speaking, your friend is right. Sometimes atheists purposely refuse to capitalize God as a proper noun when writing as if it were a matter of principle. I understand the sentiment, but I still think good grammar trumps ideology. One thing you won’t see me doing though is capitalizing pronouns referring to said God. That’s just blatantly theistic and not proper grammar at all.
Your privilege. I capitalize pronouns referring to Him, as a Christian; in addition to the showing of respect for my God, it’s also useful in distinguishing who’s being talked about: “King David prayed to Him in his remorse. And God was merciful; He heard his prayers and He answered him.” The variance between the divine He/Him and the human he/him efficiently sorts out what could be confusing.
Thou shalt not tempt the lord thy Mod.
Previous thread about capitalizing the pronouns for God:
is it insulting to christians to not capitalize pronouns referring to deity?
It is not necessary to capitalize biblegod. Here’s what I’ve noticed around the web:
Why Won’t God Heal Amputees.com, FFRF, and other sites do not cite “god” as a misspell. Neither is christ or christians, muslims or islam. Same goes for “bible”.
answeringenesis.com and sites of the like will capitalize their entire posts half of the time. I asked one user why they did that and they replied, “SO GOD CAN HEAR ME PRAISE HIM!” Sheesh.
Most users-- atheist or believers-- WILL capitalize Yahweh, Jesus, Thor, Apollo, etc, as they are first names.
It appears to come down to one thing. If you’re a believer, you fear your god (as you should in most related literature), so you capitalize out of fear of insulting the sky daddy in question. If you do that, fear will tell you to capitalize words like Him, Holy, and Trinity, most likely out of the same fear of disrespect.
As far as the hebrews go with their spelling of G-d, I’ve been told on Facebook by the submissive that if an error is made and the need to erase the sentence containing the word “God” is disrespectful. Don’t know if that’s the real reason, but since it’s a religion, there’s always more than one, indirect answer to find. :rolleyes:
“Cannot be destroyed” should probably be “may not be destroyed.” There’s a commandment saying that the Name should not be desecrated, or bad things will happen to you. They interpret this as applying to everyone. They do this to make sure you don’t unknowingly break that commandment when you throw away a piece of paper that has the word God on it.
Also note that it does not apply to electronic media. Use of appellations like “G-d” is only just in case you print it out. Backspacing over “God” is perfectly fine.
Easy way to remember; Jesus is a deity, Buddha needs a diety.
CMC fnord!
I feel stupid that it took me a few minutes to understand that joke. I use the Latin pronunciation (you know, from like Agnus Dei) to remember the spelling of deity, so it took me a bit to recognize the English word [diet].
My compliments on knowing that the background is not pure white.