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I received a great comment yesterday about why I blogged spelling God like G*d. The writer of the comment was concerned that I had censored God... so here is why I spelled the name of our Divine Being that way.

During the course of the confirmation class we talked about how the ancient Hebrews were uncomfortable speaking or even writing God's name in Hebrew. So they left out the vowels and we can only guess that YHWH is to be spelled and spoken as YaHWeH.

These followers of God wrote like that out of respect. They knew that to know someone's name was to have power over that person and since we, humans, cannot have power over God they were not about to write or speak God's name aloud in that way. So we have lots of names for God in the Old Testament like- El, El Shaddai, Elhoim etc.

Anyway in order to contemporize this idea for our confirmands, I often referred to our Lord as G*D when writing God's name on the board for discussion. Several of the student caught onto this idea and wrote/spelled G*d the same way in their Faith Statements.

I think they wanted to show me that they had paid attention in class. I only hope that they can repeat what I have just written explaining WHY we write God's name this way.