A lot of history scholars today are using BCE instead of BC and CE instead of AD for recording dates. One book I read says BCE stands for ‘Before Common Era’ which replaces ‘Before Christ’ and CE stands for ‘Common Era’ and replaces AD.
The reasoning, according to the author, is something like this: Because of the diversity of cultures in our world today, we want to remove the mention of Christ from our dating system to avoid offending other cultures.
What does not make sense to me is, even though they are removing direct references to Christ from their dating, the dates are still reported relative to the year accepted by the Church as the year of Christ’s birth. If you do not recognize the life of Christ as the defining event in your culture, what else do you use for a historical benchmark?
I have thought of a few people and events that have touched all cultures, but I see none that stand as significant as Christ.
1)Mohammad - The Moslem culture has used his life as the basis for their dating, but the Moslem culture, while highly significant on the world stage, has not had quite as great an effect on the world today as the Western culture.
2)Budda, Confucius etc. - The same situation as Mohammad
3)Hitler, Karl Marx, other 20th century figures - the 20th century was perhaps the first century where one man could have the reach to affect the entire planet. However, I for one do not want to describe an event as ‘2000 years before Hitler’!
4)The end of the last ice age - This event shaped all cultures but how do you pin the cycles of an ice age to a given year?
My conclusion: Stick with what we have. Imperfect as it is, I can not think of a better system.
