AusGeoff wrote on Nov 20
th, 2023 at 10:13pm:
I would never use the word 'God' in my everyday
speech for example, whereas deGrasse Tyson is
more than happy to use Christian phraseology.
To my way of thinking, the terms God and gods
have no logical, empirical or material definition.
If you weren't culturally conditioned to use 'god' as a nonmetaphysical exclamative or metaphor then, of course, you wouldn't use it much, if at all, unless you made a conscious Spock-like effort to extricate it from your lexicon.
deGrasse Tyson uses it in the way his American culture uses it: to denote shock or surprise, to indicate best wishes, &etc.
Atheists from a Muslim culture may use Inshallah to acknowledge a dependence on luck being on their side.
By using religious terms in those ways, the atheist speaker/writer is not betraying covert religiosity.
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