The Infidel Guy Show - Should The Words "Atheism" And "Atheist" Be Capitalized Or Not?

-- By Chimp

It's an issue of simple English grammar. Colloquially, we tend to capitalize anything we feel is important, but this is considered bad form. Only the proper names of people, races, cities, regions, counties, states, nations, languages, school subjects ("Geography 101") as well as religions ("Hare Krishna") and their followers ("Jehova's Witnesses"), sacred persons ("Saint Patrick") and objects of worship ("the Quran") should be capitalized. It's a common mistake to capitalize names of the seasons and cardinal directions. Otherwise, it's basically just a question of whether something is a proper name ("Mozilla", "Microsoft", "Chief Justice") or not. Source: Oxford Advanced Learner's (et al..

Capitalizing atheism is tantamount to declaring it a religion, and "Atheists" implies that we follow a dogma. Both "theist" and "atheist" are merely nouns describing positions on given philosophical issues rather than marks of identity falling into the categories outlined above, so capitalizing them is grammatically wrong in English. Words like "freethinker", "skeptic" or "humanist" should like-wise be kept in lowercase, just as "goth", "headbanger" and "rocker".

But hey, rules are meant to be broken. ;-)

Oh, and theists? Please spell it "atheist", and not "athiest" unless you want to be mistaken for an inbred hillbilly fundy. We can spell "Christian", so please have the courtship and decor to reciprocate this simple request.

Timestamp: Nov25, 2003