Stringsinger said,

Dave, the notion that there is a specific or unspecific god is equally unsupportable.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the above assertion, but Jupiter was a god (whether one thinks he actually existed as an entity or not), Thor was a god on the same basis, Baal was a god ditto, and Jehovah was (or "is", if that's what you want to think) a god ditto. (Lower case g, a member of the class "god").   Thus the Greeks and Romans and Norse had gods, even though I don't believe there is/was a referent entity for any of those god-names. And YHWH is a god on that same basis, I think.

In our culture, generally when one uses that monosyllable one is referring in short form to that god in Judaeo-Christian belief, Jehovah or Yahweh or YHWH, both for brevity and because our tradition commands the avoidance of pronouncing or writing the sacred name, and the ordinary class-noun "god" becomes in effect a name-substitute, a proper noun, and is rendered as "God", capitalized to show that we're referring to THAT god. But God, capitalized, is not a name, it's proper noun, though we habitually handle it as if it were a name. It's conventionally capitalized, just as the words "Him" and "He" are capitalized in referring to that putative deity, for the same reason.

If I, as an avowed atheist, have reason to refer in print to the Judaeo-Christian deity with that monosyllable, I will capitalize it, "God", not subscribing to "His" existence, but so that you and I and Charlie's Uncle know that I'm referring to that specific (though unbelieved-in) deity. If I refer to "a god", lower case, you are given to know that I'm referring to a member of the general class.

An atheist is one who doesn't believe in the actual existence of a god--ANY god, whether Zeus, Thor, Mazda, Krishna, Bella, Friga, or Jehovah, et al.

On a somewhat related subject, the Islamic reference to their believed-in one-and-only deity, "Allah", is etymologically "the god", as I understand it--thus, "The one and only member of the class, god", but it's a reference or description, not a name as such. Can't remember where I learned that.

Dave Oesterreich