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The Greek word for god is theus. The Latin word is deus. (Et is the Latin word for and, so we have etc., the abbreviation of et cetera—and so forth). That the Greek and Latin words for god are so similar comes from the fact that both languages belong to the Indo-European family of languages.
A number of English words come from the Latin deus. We have deicide (the killing of a god), deity and divinity (other words for god), and deify (to make something or someone into a god). The Roman emperor Claudius, well known for his sense of irony, is reported to have said as he expired (expire is another word for die), “I think I am about to become a deity,” and, sure enough, the Roman Senate quickly voted to deify him and appoint his priests and priestesses and to start his cult. (Cult in this context means a set of rules and rituals whereby people can worship a god. It has a second, related, meaning of a small and unorthodox religion. (When a religious movement is small, it is derogated to the category of being a cult—but if it persists and grows, it becomes a religious tradition). There are two words for a small religious movement (both slightly derogatory—a sect and a cult). Cult emphasizes the ritual and other practices; sect emphasizes the heterodox teachings. Oh! Now I have another word to explain: heterodox is used to describe religious teachings that are heretical, except that heterodox is value neutral. Heresy is the condemnatory equivalent. The opposite of heterodox is orthodox—meaning the standard or most common belief. These words are limited to the context of religious belief, so if you use them in the context of some non-religious belief, you are indirectly implying that the belief—often wryly—has some of the characteristics of a religion. (“To Mrs. Smith, shopping at a full-price store and not looking for bargains was a serious heresy;”) I feel compelled here to make a remark about capitalization. The English rule about titles is to capitalize when one is speaking of a specific person, but not otherwise. The word president is used three times in the following sentence—note how it is capitalized. “President Carter only served one term in office, while many presidents have served two and President Roosevelt served three and a half.” Applying this rule to talking about gods, one would have the sentence, “The Parthenon was built for the cult of the Goddess Athena, even though many other gods and goddesses were honored there.” Hence if you are talking about, say, the God of Christianity, it should be capitalized. The Greek word theus has also contributed words. Theology is the study of religion and the branch of philosophy that deals with ideas regarding gods or God or things supernatural. A synonym of theology is divinity. However, they have different connotations: if someone says, “I am studying theology,” they imply a philosophical course of study. If, however, someone says, “I am studying divinity,” (more likely: “I am going to divinity school”) the person is saying that they are taking a course of study in preparation to becoming a member of a religious clergy. There are two “-isms” related to religious belief. These are deism, taken, of course, from the Latin, and theism, taken from the Greek. If one believes in deism, one is a deist. On the other hand, if one believes in theism, one is a theist. These are quite different, but to understand the difference requires that one think in Western religious terms. The great Western religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all say they are monotheist religions, meaning they believe there is only one god. This is in contrast to polytheistic religions (more than one god) and atheism (not exactly a religion, since this is belief there is no god). There is argument about this: Muslims typically say that Christianity is tritheist—believes in three gods, but Christians retort that the Trinity is only one god within the three. Putting the prefix a- in front of a word creates a new word that states the lack of whatever the word means—so you have atonal for a language that doesn’t have tones (English is mostly atonal while Vietnamese is a tonal language). Another example is amoral which is used to refer to someone or something that is without morals (different from immoral, which means the person or thing has morals, but does not follow them). Deism is something else entirely. This refers to someone who thinks there probably is a God, but does not believe in the teachings about him (or her?) that we get from the religions. Most of the “founding fathers” of the USA were deists—they believed in the common Enlightenment (the name of that period of history in the West) deist idea that God had created the world and then for some reason had let it alone to run itself. There is in English-speaking circles a running debate as to whether or not religions like Buddhism and Confucianism are atheistic. Some say that because they do not have their own set of deities, they are in fact atheist. Others say that since they do not actively reject the idea of deities, but render them as irrelevant to us, that these religions are more deist than atheist. In the nineteenth century the word agnostic was proposed (and English took it up) to refer to theistic “fence sitters.” (To “sit on a fence” is to be half in one place and half in another—to be undecided). There are two kinds of agnostic: those who say they don’t know whether gods exist or not and those who say it is not possible for a finite being to know about an infinite being.
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