I've been asked this question a few times: Why do I use the upper case ‘G’ when writing about the monotheist deity? I think the answer to this is simple. The monotheist God is no less the name of a thing than Sherlock Holmes or Big Brother, and if I do not begin the names of these two fictional characters with small letters, why do it in the case of Yahweh or Allah or Olodumare – or God? To show that I do not believe in It, or that It does not exist? Well, I do not look up to Sherlock Holmes for moral or intellectual guidance (in spite of his keen intelligence!), nor do I believe that Big Brother is more than a figment of Orwellian imagination.
By the same token, if I write the initial letters of the title of a fantasy novel like Lord of the Rings or Stephen King’s It in capital, why begin the word Bible with the lower case (except, of course, in the case of the figurative bible: the bible of foodies, for instance). I write the ‘G’ in God in capital because whether It exists or not, It is an entity. I’ve seen someone write ‘Ogun’ and ‘jesus’ in the same sentence. I was rather amused because so far as I am concerned, both figures are semi-mythical, and while Jesus has the advantage of being scripted (though he might as well be fictional), Ogun is orally storied.
But then I am not being prescriptive or anything - let’s not turn this into a kind of Swiftian war between upper-casers and lower-casers. If it takes your fancy, write God with the small ‘g.’ After all, ee cummings wrote everything in lower case - it might as well be a matter of style and expediency in this age of textese. Why go to the trouble of tapping ‘caps lock’ to write about a deity you dislike, even abhor, the deity you want to damn, that you want to give some well-deserved slapdown. For a lot of people, it is also lexically trendy to write God with the small ‘g’, it is now a noticeable inflection in atheist-speak, one of whose salient characteristics is lippiness. But I think the parodic belittling that the small ‘g’ is supposed to achieve if the article ‘the’ is used before ‘god,’ or even ‘that,’ so that it reads this way ‘the god who created the world in six days.’ Although, in my opinion, it is better to differentiate, for clarity, the monotheist God and Its polytheist friends with upper and lower cases (being proper and common nouns), it is fair to say it’s easy to deduce the deity the users of the lower case ‘g’ are writing about when it is used, what other god would atheists have time for if not the so-called ‘sky-daddy?’ Indeed, that great philosopher of Language Game, Ludwig Wittgenstein, would be proud of lower-casers.
I’d like to believe I am not a purist, I make free with language. Unlike prescriptivists, I believe nothing about verbality should be fixed. So why not slip into the emerging in-thing of using the small ‘g’ for God? I don’t often do this because I suspect that there is an underlying and unsuspected fear beneath the foregrounding of the lower case ‘g’ for monotheist God. Oh no, not the proverbial Fear of God, but the fear of embarrassment. Fear of what fellow ‘unbelievers’ might think of you if you constantly write ‘God.’ Fear that you might be seen as still having a vestige of belief and faith in God, that you still think It is - or why else would you dignify It with capital ‘G’ if you said you did not believe in It. But the fear I am talking about is subliminal, slippery and reversed, because if you ask anyone who writes God with the small ‘g’ that she does that because of fear, she’ll say no and may go on: ‘I just don’t give a fuck about god’ – which, again, is true, just as the subfear of being judged for being too polite with and about God.
I use the big ‘G’ for the human-creation that is God because I believe it is better to do this and yet be objective and clear about your lack of belief in It. I use the big ‘B’ for the human-written Bible and Quran because I believe it is possible to do this while pointing out the absurdities, contradictions, archaisms and fictions in the books. I use the big ‘J’ for the biblical Jesus because it might as well be the name of a ragtag roving rabbi who lived some time ago in Palestine, or the name of an entirely imaginary man-god like Zeus. Wouldn’t it be silly of me to write ‘zeus’ in order to prove that he never existed and that he was a creation of Greek imagination? What could be more compelling and pointed than Dawkins’ pronouncement on ‘God?’: ‘The God of the Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust..’ and so on
