I was just curious since gods have names. It just seems to be a popular thing to just say, "god," but I was curious why.
You are right to ask the question. Anyone who tries to belittle your question is fearful of the truth.
The term ‘God’ is indeed a title, and as such is rightly fully written as ‘The God
[of some aspect].
True again, every belief system that has a divine Being (a Deity) refers to such as their ‘God’, and when they believe in many such divine Being, they give each one a personal identifier - a name.
In fact, the word, ‘God’ is of
Germanic origins incorporated into English (but more likely Latin before that) so the word is forced into universal usage by translators.
In Jewish belief, and subsequent Christianity, there is only one such divine Being, one deity, and because it is fully internal to the theology there was no need for the divine Being to have a personal identifier.
When the Israelites were living among the Egyptians, they became enamoured by the many deities that the Egyptians worshipped, and that each deity had a personal identifier, a name. When Moses returned from his exile from the Israelites he brought a message from HIS GOD to them saying they should go into the wilderness to worship their only ‘God’. To ratify this command Moses knew the Israelites would asked him, ‘
WHICH GOD has given you this command?’. What could Moses say to them? They were demanding a NAME for THEIR GOD just like the Egyptians. The God of Moses and the Israelites knew that the people would not be satisfied with ‘The God of your forefathers’ so He spelled out TK Moses who He (God) was:
- ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’
- ‘I am he who is, was, and always will be’
- ‘I am everlasting’
- ‘Therefore tell the people my name is to ‘YAHWEH’ (which expresses the MEANING of ‘I Am’)
Now, I don’t know about others but to me there is no better name (YAHWEH) and meaning to such a word as ‘I Am’ to express the almightiness of the claim of the Israelite God.
HOWEVER…. The Israelites, now called ‘Jews’, used this almighty name to swear oaths and agreements. Soon, some began to default on the oaths and agreements, thus bringing the sanctity of the name of
their God (‘Yahweh’) into disrepute. As such they stopped using the name of
their God altogether to stop the chance of causing offence to their God (thus itself causing an offence to their God by losing the pronunciation of the name) and as such they simply called upon their deity as ‘GOD’, which cannot cause offence since it is a title, but can if the usage is falsely used. Afterall, who thinks that YAHWEH is offended by an utterance of ‘Oh My God!!?’ as an expression of surprise… ‘
Which God is it referring to????!!’. The utterer can say they did not mean the Jewish or Christian
God!! Could have been ‘
the God of Shocks and Surprises!’
Returning to personal identifier aspect: We do something similar in our own language, for instance, we might refer to the Head Teacher of a school as ‘[The] Principal’. There is only one Principal in any school and in the mass number of situations there is absolutely no need to know the personal name of this Principal. Subordinates, pupils, nearly everyone internal to the school just calls him, “Principal”. Alternatively, he could be referred to with a lesser title of ‘Sir’.
Notice this second lesser title is akin to ‘Lord’ in religious terms. It simply means someone who is in charge over those who call him so, it does not EXPLICITLY refer to the Principal.
This difference is casually ignored in trinitarian Christian belief wherein they claim that ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ refer to the exact self-same deity … clearly in error as much as calling, say, the class teacher, ‘Sir’ means the class teacher
is the Principal.
Reality check: All persons in charge can be called ‘Sir’ - the Principal is in charge and so are the subordinate teachers but still there is only one Principal among them all.
