You want me to use BCE and CE instead of BC and AD because its too 'religious'
But what event triggers this "common era"?
:lea-smug: :very-smart:
You want me to use BCE and CE instead of BC and AD because its too 'religious'
But what event triggers this "common era"?
:lea-smug: :very-smart:
Hey, I'm a BCE/CE Enjoyer, so I'll defend it.
You need some point in history to be year "0". There is no way you will get the whole world agreeing to one point of reference, not to mention how difficult it would be get everyone to start using that new point anyway. So we have to go with the birth of Jesus (or what people thought it was, we don't actually know when Jesus was born).
But the BC/AD terms just reinforce Christian social domination. We can't do anything about the actual year 0, but we can at least try and make the terminology neutral. And it makes evangelicals pissy, which is always fun.
Also iirc Christian scholars are still debating Jesus' birth and whatnot, meaning BC/AD are in possible flux, while B/CE standardizes the calendar.
Yes, because the gospels fundamentally contradict. One gospel mentions King Herod killing babies but he died in 4 BCE. Another gospel talks about a census as the reason Mary & Joseph were in Bethlehem, but the first Roman census in that region was in 6 CE (and it was for Judah, not Galilee where Bethlehem was but the author just likely screwed that up).
i've seen people use BP (before present) where "present" is 1 jan 1950 (caused by radiocarbon dating shenanigans), if you're historian-adjacent, you might have not heard of this, but it's common in geology; at least that's what i thought until i came upon a paper (about pastoralism in neolithic northern africa) that was just using BP time like it was nothing, including dates like 1200 BP which i just cannot grasp and have to do mental math (so 0 BP is 1950 CE by definition, and seeing that BP is just distance from 1950 CE, then 1950 BP is 0 CE so 1200 BP is 1950 - 1200 = 750 CE)
Sure would be great if we actually had a year zero then. Going from 1BCE to 1CE annoys me more that whether it's CE or AD.
At the very least Jews and Muslims have their own calendars. I think there's an Orthodox calendar. And I'm sure there are dozens of others.