Someone seriously pissed off Alexander Lucie-Smith, a Catholic priest, because this is the last paragraph of an article he wrote for the Catholic Herald:

Heresy, and atheism, produce nothing beautiful. They can’t. They are stony barren fields. And the examples above are some of the ugly fruit of these intellectually incoherent movements.

Wow. What did we do?! Did atheists desecrate a Renaissance painting depicting a scene from the Bible? Did we burn down an ancient church? Did we kill off an entire group of religious people?

Nope.

Someone didn’t capitalize the word “God”:

Those who deny the capital letter to the Almighty do so out of a desire to belittle Him… This actually has a long history. Back in the day when anti-Semitism was openly espoused by writers and publishers, some used to deny the capital letter to the term ‘Jew’…

So if you write “god,” you’re practically an anti-Semite.

Man, he’s gonna hate those of us who write g0d… which is a word with nothing on the inside.

That’s not the only thing atheist grammar-deniers did to make him angry. Lucie-Smith can’t stand anyone who uses CE and BCE when naming years instead of BC and AD:

One would like to know why the “Common Era” — whatever that is — began at just the moment that Christ was born? If the exponents of CE and BCE wish to use the unlovely terms, why don’t they pick a key date (on which they can all agree!) at which the Common Era begins that has nothing to do with Christ?

Then-Secretary of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, explained the CE/BCE reasoning back in 1999:

[T]he Christian calendar no longer belongs exclusively to Christians. There is so much interaction between people of different faiths and cultures — different civilizations, if you like — that some shared way of reckoning time is a necessity. And so the Christian Era has become the Common Era.

Father Grammar Nazi wasn’t done there, either. He had one more reason to complain: There are people who don’t use “He” as a pronoun for God! Not “It.” Sure-as-hell not “She.” (And I’ll bet “He” has to be capitalized, too.)

Watch out for the few (and they are still thankfully few) who say at Mass “It is right to give God thanks and praise” instead of “It is right to give Him thanks and praise.” To refuse to address God as He is in fact to attack the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. It is completely unacceptable theologically; but it is also downright ugly and silly. Particularly so is the use of the neologism ‘Godself”, as in “God reveals Godself to us.” Anyone using that is, frankly, a heretic, and, what is almost as bad, an abuser of the English language.

For what it’s worth, I tend to capitalize God for purely grammatical reasons — it’s a proper name, and those ought to be capitalized, and I feel dirty when I don’t do it. But Lucie-Smith is taking that compulsion to a whole new level.

And lest you think he’s only trying to preserve the rules of grammar, he added this lovely point on Twitter:

@peter_ismyname I would love to see ‘Allah’ with a small a. — Xander Lucie-Smith (@ALucieSmith) June 3, 2013

So it’s not a Grammar issue. He’s just mad when other people don’t respect his god.

That previous sentence is gonna make him lose his shit. Oh well.

(Thanks to @juniperjulip for the link!)



