The underlying numerical characters are Indian, and we refer to them as Arabic numerals. Should we stop doing that?
So what are you going to achieve by getting rid of BC?
Removing BC/AD is a small step in reducing the amount of influence religion has on our daily lives. The point is that if we don’t question these things, they become normal and ingrained, and much harder to remove or critique. I’ve had Christians tell me in arguments that because the calendar is based on Christianity, or because our money has god on it, then it proves something something Christianity is superior.
Likely, removing this one thing will amount to little, but its a drop in the bucket that will eventually be full, or a snowball that starts an avalanche. I completely agree with people who say changing our calendar is a pointless and futile gesture and they would be right if that’s all we did, but along with removing things like the 10 commandments from public buildings (or adding multi-religious representations), or stores switching to X-mas instead of saying Christmas, it adds up.
We can probably all point to things that’s happened in our lifetimes of Christianity’s unchallenged reign being poked and prodded, and people asking, then demanding equal time. Its a slow process but we will get there, but it will never happen if people are too unconcerned or afraid to take small steps. Maybe today its changing textbooks to say BCE/CE and having a generation of kids grow up thinking that’s the norm. Maybe in another year we’ll remove god from our money. As kids and then adults get used to not having Christianity shoved in their faces everywhere they go, maybe somebody gets the Pledge to remove “under god” just as easily as it was added in less than a century ago. And maybe a Muslim or atheist gets elected and they stop having Christian prayers begin sessions of Congress. All the while traditional bastions of Christianity falls like gay marriage being legalized, or creationism and Intelligent Design finally get eliminated in public schools. Then, with less Christianity in your face all the time, maybe less of them will care that local cities make public space available during Christmas for non-manger scenes, and eventually we can have an openly non-Christian president who will fight blatant religious favoritism.
But none of that would be possible if we don’t start somewhere. Sure, maybe we get there without changing the dates, but it couldn’t hurt
Most of the good stuff has been said, but I agree that BC/BCE invites confusion for no real benefit. I do put the “AD” after the year, though, for symmetry’s sake. Would the ordinal “2014th AD” take care of any grammatical problems?
And why should we bother doing that? Religion is about as irrelevant to much of my life as reality TV, and there are several things about both religion and reality TV that I personally think are not influencing society positively. But I don’t think that means that either of them needs to be ultimately eradicated from our culture.
Shoot, kid, I’m not taking up arms for a full-on calendric nomenclature revision just so you can prevent Christians you argue with from scoring some debating points. Which seems to be about all you can come up with as a projected benefit from doing away with BC/AD.
You are tragically confused about the distinction between Christian cultural influences in a historically majority-Christian society and unconstitutional government entanglement with religion in a legal framework that’s intended to be religiously neutral. Combating the latter does not require eradicating the former.
The version of this term I always use, which I think is objectively more correct, is “Indo-Arabic numerals”, or more fully “Indo-Arabic decimal place-value numerals”.
But I’m also fine with simply saying “decimal place-value numerals”. Just as with the calendar era designation issue, I don’t see anything wrong with having a more generic common identifier as an alternative to the older term which is specific to the historical context.
Tiw, Wotan, Thor, and Freya want their days back, then.
But how much influence does it have? While I intellectually know what BC/AD stand for, as far as I’m concerned, they’re “words” in and of themselves. “BC” doesn’t mean “Before Christ” it just means “some really old period”, or perhaps, “everything from the creation of the universe to some arbitrary point exactly 1 year before AD”. And “AD” means “relatively recent history”, not “the year of our lord”/“anno domini”.
It’s like i.e., e.g., PhD, ATM, NASA, and PIN. The things they stand for is largely irrelevant, and the first two I couldn’t actually tell you what they stood for off the top of my head (granted they’re Latin). As far as I’m concerned, the initialisms and acronyms are entities of their own.
I’m all for talking “under god” out of the pledge, and removing “in god we trust” from the things it’s stamped on, but BC/AD are so detached from religious connotation in everyday life I just can’t see the point.
True. And even more importantly, there’s a crucial difference between the two contexts in terms of government sponsorship of religion.
Using religious mottoes like “under God” and “in God we trust” on official currency and in government-promoted loyalty oaths for schoolchildren is advocacy for religious faith on the part of the government. The Supreme Court has shrugged off this sort of endorsement as, essentially, too trivial to worry about because nobody takes it seriously (see “ceremonial deism”). But it is still at least technically a violation of the principle that our secular government is supposed to remain officially neutral in matters of religion.
Using conventional BC/AD dating on government documents, on the other hand, is no more an endorsement or promotion of Christianity than using pagan-deity weekday names like “Thursday” or “Saturday” on those same documents is an endorsement of polytheism.
Saying that the government shouldn’t use a centuries-old standard conventional notation because of its historical roots in Christianity is as silly as saying that the government shouldn’t send mail to people named, e.g., “Christopher” or “Nathaniel” because of the names’ religious connotations. Using recognized systems of nomenclature that happen to be derived from religious traditions is not the same thing as actively endorsing or promoting religion.
Take two:
Again: common refers to the era, not the system. If anything, it’s the Era System. So your argument is, like the term “common era”, bupkis.
Bold mine.
As pointed out there is a cultural heritage in AD/BC that comparable to the names of the days of the week. Intentionally trying to destroy them is akin to the Fahrenheit 591 story on book burning, so I would not be sure that ‘it couldn’t hurt’ if the historical cultural truth is intentionally hidden - as your post suggested should be done.
By the argument you seem to be making, every era currently still in use, such as the Hijra era of the Islamic calendar or the Saka or Samvat eras of the Hindu calendar, could equally well be called a “common era”. All simultaneously existing eras are equally “common” in the sense that “we’re all in them right now”.
But the term “common” in the sense of the “Common Era” does not mean merely “current” or “contemporary”. “Common era” is derived from Latin aera vulgaris or ''era of the ordinary/common people" (as opposed to, for instance, the “regnal-year” eras dated from the coronation of the reigning monarchs).
So the term “common era” as a general term for “the standard default calendar era that people routinely use for ordinary reference purposes, in preference to other more specialized epochs” has a well-established history. It has never meant merely “a calendar era that happens to be in use at the current moment”.
Except that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t understand either the meaning or the derivation of the term “Common Era”, or why Johnny Bravo’s description of it was essentially correct.
Hah! You are simply trying to suppress and persecute adherents of Sedevacantism.
A girl at a bar in L.A. just told me she was taught “before Christ” was awful, awful times. And “after death” (not Anno Domini) meant all was for us. She said she didn’t believe it, but her family in Indiana certainly does. This was after I showed her this thread.
I’ve had catholic nuns tell me similar, using the same terminology, in my years of parochial education. I’m willing to bet The 700 Club does similar. And I think it aids to ignorance taught through abbreviations. 
As I posted earlier, we’re not all xtians. And when we’re talking about time and history, it isn’t necessarily a religious conversation.
Yeahhhhhhno.
Firstly, if you honestly believe that using secular terminology for our dating, even when that dating is based on a particular religion, is similar in any way to Fahrenheit 451, you haven’t the fainest idea what that goddamn book was about.
Secondly, nearly no one knows or cares about the Moon, Tyr, Wotan, Thor, Frigg, Saturn, or the Sun in terms of the days of the week. The “cultural heritage” there is essentially nonexistent, so saying that they are comparable to “In the Year of Our Lord” seems to me to merely undermine your point.
Unless, that is, you are arguing that we should care precisely as much about Jesus of Nazareth as about Frigg in our daily lives. Which AFAIC is just fine…but it’s not “Frigg’s Day,” it’s “Friday.” It’s completely divorced from its origins, in a way that “Anno Domini” is not.
Why are you showing SDMB threads to random girls in bars?
“Hey baby, wanna go back to my place?”
whips out laptop
Given that our calendar has no basis in historical fact for its timeline, I think we need to redo the calendar completely. Pick a fixed, historical event and base the calendar from that. For example, we might use the arrival of the light from the supernova event that created the Crab Nebula (SN 1054). Under our current calendar, that corresponds to 4 July 1054. We could make that be day 0 of the new calendar. All dates before it would be referred to as BSN; all dates after would be SN.
Or something like that.
Why, what power do you believe exists in 'the year of our Lord, that Thor’s Day does not also possess?
If it’s nonsense then let it pass, if it is a powerful threat oppose it and destroy it. You are the one who is ascribing power to it in your statement.
I think we should ascribe the date as 0 when our first space probe leaves our solar system, So for now we can estimate that date, perhaps 100 yrs out (Hopefully sooner), so we are right now at 100 ITRST (Intrastellerspacetime) and we can could backwards to 0, then we should have something operational beyond the influence of our sun, then we can call it year 1 ITEST (Interstellerspacetime), and we can shorten this to R and E, so no confusion with BC and AD, not a single letter reused.