Well yeah, but it’s a pretty serious prayer. So “God, damn the man who killed my children” is valid but “god damn the guy who cut me off it traffic” is taking the lord’s name in vain. Which is pretty bad assuming you purport to believe in the god who purportably said that.
I don’t know if you guys know the http://www.capalert.com/capreports/ web site sometimes they talk about the “most foul of foul words” with out actually using the word. for instance in http://www.capalert.com/capreports/greenmile.htm
could their “most foul of foul words” be “god Damn”?
Couldn’t one make the argument that “God Damn” and “God Damn It” aren’t profanity at all? I mean, the bible makes all sorts of reference to God damning this, and God damning that. The fact that everyone, including aetheists, uses these phrases makes this a secular question, not a religious one. So I’m not bound to any religious “rules” about how I’m “not supposed to say that.” I could just as easily say, “God Smite It!” And that would be perfectly acceptable. Nothing more than a very short and to the point prayer, spoken aloud, as I ask God to condemn someone or something to eternal hellfire. Is that so bad?
I can understand the phrase, “Jesus Fucking Christ” or even simply, “Jesus Christ!” being considered profanity, because it has no value in and of itself. There is no context to give it meaning - it is simply an angry outpouring of aggression.
It’s a fine line, I grant you, but the intent and the context of what is being said should be supremely important in determining whether a statement is profane. It can’t only be about the words themselves.
- OlPeculiar.
Feh. People pray for and thank god for really measly, inconsequential reasons all the time. No, I don’t believe (so it doesn’t have any real meaning to me at all) but who’s to say which issues are worth an official damning? When you get down to it, you shouldn’t ask god to do any damning at all. If you believe, that is. I’m thinking he’d probably only do it if he felt it was necessary; not because someone asked him to.
It is odd. Even though I am agnostic, it is still one of the phrases that I find most offensive. It was deeply ingrained in my from my youth and it still bothers me.
That and the popular variation J F’n C do get my ire up. My brother says it frequently in front of me, knowing how I feel about it- but he doesn’t dare let it slip in front of Mom.
(I’m 42, he’s 40- neither of us too big to be chastised by Mom for bad language! 
)
I don’t know of anyone that would call me a “religious fanatic”, and I don’t use it. Like several others mentioned here, it never sat well with me and still doesn’t. I wouldn’t really deem it worse than “fuck” or “shit” or “cunt”, but I use those occasionally. I could probably count on my fingers and toes the number of times I’ve said GD in my twenty-five years.
See? I don’t even like typing it. :smack:
I’m with Friar Ted. I find “J F’n C” extremely offensive, and it’s a favorite phrase of my husband’s. He’s a lapsed Catholic, but planned to give up meat on Fridays during Lent. I asked him to give up that phrase instead. G-D doesn’t offend me nearly as much. I’m not much of a “cusser” myself, and prefer to make up my own words as the mood strikes me.
I say it fairly often, but in my mind it’s got nothing to do with God; it’s become its own word: goddammit, or goddam is how I mentally spell it.
Oddly, I’ve been an atheist forever, but my stepfather drilled into us the notion that you shouldn’t say, “Oh my God.” I say “goddammit” probably five or ten times a day, but I still can’t break that internal filter; I say, “Oh my gosh.” On the rare occasions that I do say “Oh my God,” that teenager’s sense of having “gotten away with something” comes back as strong as ever, fifteen years after my teen years ended.
I think the key point in all this is that these words have almost all become abstractions. When I say, or hear someone say, “motherfucker,” it never crosses my mind that it’s an accusation of incest; it’s just a word that has managed to retain more power than most, thanks to its being unacceptable in some social situations. Same with “cocksucker,” “goddammit” (as I said above), and all the others–they’ve lost their connection with their original meanings, and exist on their own.
I was in a community theater production of “A Few Good Men” a couple of years ago. The college girl who played Galloway was the daughter of a fundamentalist preacher. She took smoke breaks with the rest of the cast, had now trouble swearing when it was called for in the script (and other times.) But she absolutely refused to say the words “God damn” in the one place her character was supposed to say them. She had no trouble with “Jesus Christ, Kaffee, you’re in the fucking Navy!” but would not say “Goddamn.”
Huh. I’m not religious at all, though I sort of tried to “find my religion” for a while as a teenager before concluding that Rational Humanism was the only thing I could accept. Still, I had no idea anybody considered “goddamn” (I usually think of it as a single word) as a serious curse at all. In fact, “goddammit” is my generic, trying-not-to-really-swear venting word (which I also don’t even think of as a sentence, “God Damn It”), like what I would say if I stubbed my toe.
I used to work with a guy who used “fuck” and “shit” all the time, which I do not, and which I find unprofessional. One time I got worked up enough while talking with him to refer to a third person (who he was defending to me) as someone “who’s not doing his fucking job”, then immediately excused myself for my language. He replied that such words didn’t bother him, but that “using ‘Jesus’ as an expletive” did, which I only then realized I did all the time. Mostly in the form of exclaiming “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” or “Jesus H. Christ”, and if particularly upset, adding “…on a crooked cross”.
He’d never mentioned it to me before, nor had I ever noticed him being particularly religious, but I apologized for any past offenses (knowing they were many) and took care to avoid such lingo around him in the future.
I guess I should mentally promote “Goddamn” to the same level of potential offensiveness.
You know, I wonder where I picked up this blasphemous style of profanity, given that I did not grow up in a religious household? Well, I did grow up in a largely Catholic (Irish and Italian) part of NYC, maybe there was a lot of such swearing going on when I was a kid and I just picked it up without thinking about it?