“He”
English lacks a gender neutral pronoun that would be more appropriate. “S/He” is clumsy looking, “It” is for an object. I tend to go with “He” over “She” just out of habit and history, but “She” doesn’t bother me.
I completely agree with this.
For myself, I use “god” and “god’s”, which can get a bit awkward (“When god hid god’s face from Moses”, etc). But to me it is still vastly preferable to “it”, which removes any sense of characterisation and personality, “she”, which I like for equalising all of the “he”-defaulters but always derails into a Why Yes I Am A Feminist And Yes My God Is Non-Gendered, which is a good conversation but gets tiresome when it’s the only conversation, or “he”, which as you say effectively marginalises half the people in the world.
There is also a bit of theological support in the idea that one of the Jewish god’s characteristics is to be echad, which is so singular that god needs a very singular pronoun as well.
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Edward Feser, a catholic philosopher whom I alternately admire and vehemently disagree with-slash-utterly despise, has a short article arguing that the masculine pronoun is more appropriate because God is more analogically male than female or neuter. I offer it here because it is relevant and probably close to what many Christian theists would articulate, but I do not find it very convincing.
His first argument:
And his second:
My emotional reaction to the first is quite negative; I suspect (even as a budding quasi-catholic) that the conception of male as head-of-household is at best no longer relevant and at worst an unalloyed bad. The second just seems like hardly relevant ex post rationalization.
I do the awkward pronoun-avoiding thing.
His Divine Do-Nothingness, The Perpetually Disinterested Absentee Landlord Of All Heavenly Bodies And Compactified Domains, Whom We Shall Also Know As Rodney.
Stranger
Can someone help me get these feces off my shoes?
Is it threadshitting if an atheist offers a serious response?
I tend to use ‘they’ (as a singular) when referring to a poorly specified god, or sometimes ‘it’ (though ‘it’ often makes for ambiguous-sounding sentences, so it is to be avoided. It the word ‘it’ is to be avoided, I mean. See what I mean?) When speaking about the judaeochristian god ‘God’ or Thor or the FSM or some other god that’s generally considered to be explicitly male, I may use ‘he’ occasionally, either for clarity or by accident. I virtually never capitalize ‘he’, though; I’m a disrespectful cuss.
I only use ‘she’ when referring to an explicitly female god, a class of which I do not consider the judaeochristian god to be a member.
When referring to “God” (the force I believe to be within and behind the Universe, though being of no particular religion…perhaps not even a “theist” as most think of the term) I avoid pronouns whenever possible. When not possible, I use It or She/He.
The very IDEA that “God” could be of either sex (as opposed to NO sex or BOTH/ALL) has always struck me as silly and somewhat offensive.
Though I will admit that Jehovah/Yaweh is definately a male God in both how He is referred to in the texts and His behavior. But He is not MY God. 