Oh, and what is it with atheists these days saying "god" in lower-case all the time? It wasn't like that back in my day. I'm not a Buddhist, but I can still bring myself to use a capital "B" for the word "Buddha". Ditto "Allah", "Krishna" and "Flying Spaghetti Monster". :-) What next? Dropping the typeface a couple of points to show you really, really don't believe in God?
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Australian Atheist
An interesting exchange over on Craig's blog. I particularly like this comment from John H:
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2 comments:
Seems a simple point of good writing style to me.
A Christian might see an atheist as disbelieving in her particular god. But doesn't the a- prefix denote lack of something? So just as you have mono- and polytheists, atheists don't just disbelieve in Jehovah but also Zeus etc. I'm no Chicago Manual of Style but it seems that it's perfectly appropriate to use lower case when you're denying that any god exists.
But, being a sticker, I personally capitalise the Judaeo-Christian god when using the word as a proper-noun (not to mention all His pronouns). Still, I prefer to just call Him Yahweh. I'm yet to find a Christian who is actually bothered by that. Maybe Life of Brian wasn't entirely accurate...
(I also notice that Australian Atheist didn't capitalise "Commonwealth" when referring to the Commonwealth of Australia. I wouldn't read too much into it.)
I have had a shot at responding to John H here: Australian Atheist.
(I also notice that Australian Atheist didn't capitalise "Commonwealth" when referring to the Commonwealth of Australia. I wouldn't read too much into it.)
I don't capitalise "commonwealth" because I don't use the term to as an abbreviation for Commonwealth of Australia. I do use it to refer to Australia but more in the way an American may say “travelling across the republic” to refer to crossing their homeland. Australia is a commonwealth in that we all share a common land, pay taxes to assist each other, volunteer etc.
According to Wikipedia: The term literally meant "common well-being". Thus commonwealth originally meant a state or nation-state governed for the common good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth
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