My thesis: what most people refer to as god is an idea, personified by ethnocentric religions, un-named for sheer effect, and the capitalization of this idea into Proper-Noun-hood is full of logical inconsistencies that ultimately weaken the benefits of believing in such a transcendent being.
Note: I won't try and prove this tonight, as I should be sleeping, but I'm going to go ahead and point the way to what I'm thinking and hopefully not sound like an angry heretic, which is not what I am.
Say two strangers meet and peace is disrupted between them. They only communicate by writing. One says, "you have offended my god, and that is why I must make holy war on you." The other says, "God told me to say what I said, and God's bible says that your god is a crappy false idol," for humans are afterall nothing if not egocentric.
On balance, I call the former man the wiser man. To assume that God is a proper noun is to assume that you're talking about the same god the other person is talking about. To say 'my god' is more accurate, since only a great fool would think that anyone's conception of GOD THE CREATOR THE UNIVERSE ITSELF THE QUESTION AND THE ANSWER TO ALL THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS IN HUMAN MYSTICISM SINCE THE BEGINNING AND BEYOND THE END OF TIME is the same as anyone else's conception of that concept. It is hubris, aggression, and repugnant ethnocentrism/egocentrism that leads so many people of faith to capitalize their one true god. To not capitalize (especially once precedence has been set and so religiously adhered to), if it offends the Christian or other, shows that a small symbolic correction somehow diminishes their faith, or worse yet, brings the possibility of other gods existing to the forefront of their minds. This is tantamount to walking into Congress and publicly declaring that capitalism is not the best economic system. You'd get stoned, and not in the Dylan kind of way.
Counterarguements they will make and my responses to them:
from wikipedia:
"The capitalized form God was first used in Ulfilas's Gothic translation of the New Testament, to represent the Greek Theos. In the English language, the capitalization continues to represent a distinction between monotheistic "God" and "gods" in polytheism.[6][7] In spite of significant differences between religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, the Bahá'í Faith, and Judaism, the term "God" remains an English translation common to all. The name may signify any related or similar monotheistic deities, such as the early monotheism of Akhenaten and Zoroastrianism."
However, one does not need to distinguish a non-plural monotheistic God from polytheistic gods. First of all, it's all theism, so the only reason to distinguish is in the case of reference to a monotheistic god vs. one particular polytheistic god - in which case surely, SURELY, context might provide some hint. Second, although it is stated that God is not the same for any of the Abrahamic religions, a decent reason for God being referred to in a unified way is never given. Other than the interests of ecumenical peace negotiations, I'd say the only reason is to piss off and marginalize atheists and polytheists. Any characteristics of their god that are all shared are probably just good ways to keep patriarchy and oligarchy seeming reasonable and expected in the minds of the serfs.
Same source: "Conceptions of God can vary widely, but the word God in English—and its counterparts in other languages, such as Latinate Deus, Greek Θεός, Slavic Bog, Sanskrit Ishvara, or Arabic Allah—are normally used for any and all conceptions. The same holds for Hebrew El, but in Judaism, God is also given a proper name, the tetragrammaton (usually reconstructed as Yahweh or YHWH), believed to be a mark of the religion's henotheistic origins. In many translations of the Bible, when the word "LORD" is in all capitals, it signifies that the word represents the tetragrammaton.[8] God may also be given a proper name in monotheistic currents of Hinduism which emphasize the personal nature of God,..."
All the names listed here are clearly proper nouns, but religions designed to spread tend to drop the proper name (seems like Christianity does this the most) since walking into a village and saying, "you will all worship Bob" or "Allah" doesn't work as well as walking into a village and saying, "I come representing the one true God who has no name and is also every name you can think of - take these trinkets and the gift of literacy so that you may tithe and be sold to slavery." Note that this last critique speaks to some of the history of Christianity, not modern necessarily - back when the capitalization tradition was started.
Same source (0nly source? we'll see): "Proper nouns (also called proper names) are nouns representing unique entities (such as London, Jupiter or Johnny), as distinguished from common nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, planet or person).[8] Proper nouns are not normally preceded by an article or other limiting modifier (such as any or some), and are used to denote a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have.
In English and most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, proper nouns are usually capitalized."
So if I'm talking about God, who isn't 'any' god or 'some' god, then God denotes a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have. Congratulations capitalizer, you just anthropromorphized yourself into a shoddy religion that automatically assumes everyone else in the world will point to the sky and agree with you. You probably just pissed off every other culture in the world accidentally because your philosophy innately assumes universal agreement.
More importantly, I'd say that someone enlightened enough to refer to God as 'my god', 'our god', or even Yaweah or something, has a leg up on being well recieved by other human beings who have their own ideas about creation, philosophy, spirituality, and morality. Someone who strictly adheres to capitalization probably also thinks that the U.S. is a Christian nation where God has mandated the sacred unwritten eleventh commandment "Thou shalt be armed at all times, especially at political rallys." Evolution has a thing or two to say about cultures with that philosophy.
and...my wife says lastly...also wikipedia: "Sometimes the same word can function as both a common noun and a proper noun, where one such entity is special. For example the common noun god denotes all deities, while the proper noun God references a monotheistic God specifically."
This outlines the logical fallacies I've been trying to point out. God is not specific. Never has been, and never will be, and I would argue on philosophical grounds couldn't be. Something that is undefinable, transcendent, everywhere and nowhere, and most of all culturally constructed, cannot be a proper, specific, special, identifying referant called God.
Case closed.
Merry Christmas.
I capitalize Merry because it's at the beginning of a sentence. I capitalize Christmas because it is a Holiday known around the world since, though it bears the 'annointed' name, it is derived from a half-a-dozen religions, cultures, and traditions.
Plus it is a great opportunity to focus on peace, charity, joy, and the un-egocentrizing of everyone in your family or peer group. I don't have to go to mass to celebrate Christmas, and I don't have to capitalize god to have faith, feel blessed, or live life as a good person. Meanwhile, it is an important lesson to understand why things are the way they are, and to give a little more room in our lives for the acceptance and empathy of other ways of being.
Oh, and Happy Haunika. If Aimee reads this she knows I meant no offense by misspelling her cultures solstice tradition. I made up for it by capitalizing Happy. : )
