I’m proper all the way. My calendars’ weeks all start on Sunday and my toilet paper hangs down over the top, all just as God intended dadgummit!
Forget the Bible, you need to brush up on ISO 8601.
International Organization for Standardization 1 - God 0.
ISO? Isn’t that the outfit that belongs to the Godless Swiss?
Suddenly, I’m remembering a great photograph I saw of a love motel somewhere in the Philippines that claimed, on it’s portable sign outside, to be ISO certified.
Um, I don’t do religion so I may be wrong here, but isn’t Sunday the seventh day, the day that God rested after making everything? So, the week would start on Monday, right?
The Biblical Sabbath Day is indeed the seventh day of the week, which is why Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists observe Saturday (the seventh and last day of the week) as the day of worship. Most Christians now observe Sunday (traditionally the first day of the week) as their day of worship.
Hmm I can’t imagine ISO certified love making would be a major selling point, quite the opposite in fact. I couldn’t find any specifics on the Swiss approved methodology although I did stumble across an ISO 9000 certified manufacturer of sex bolts, which isn’t half as dirty as I was hoping it would be.
- And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.*
So why should a week start on the 7th day?
OK, if most of the US is Christian and these days they observe Sunday as their day of worship, again why don’t calendars start with Monday? Heck, to take this one step further, if most of the country runs a Monday to Friday work week, why don’t calendars start with Monday?
Christians believe that Sunday, the ‘Lord’s Day’ marks the start of the week. This is because the resurrection of Jesus supposedly took place on the ‘first day of the week’ (Mark 16:9), not the Sabbath. Read more about it on wikipedia.
Because while Christians shifted the day of worship to Sunday, they didn’t change the day on which they believe the world was created.
I grew up with Sunday-Saturday, but I think Monday-Sunday makes more sense, for many reasons already laid out.
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The work week begins with Monday, followed by the weekend. Why would the weekend be at the beginning?
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God’s work week also seems to agree.
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Chinese calls Monday “Week 1”, Tuesday “Week 2”, and so on until Sunday “Week Day”. Although the last is ambiguous, I think having “Week 1” be the first day of the week is just nice and elegant. 1.3 billion people can’t be wrong, right?
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It’s nice to save the best for last.
God started making things on Sunday?
They start their calendars with Sunday because that’s how people have been starting calendars for several thousand years.
Sunday: 1st day – Christian worship day.
Monday: 2nd day
Tuesday: 3rd day
Wednesday: 4th day
Thursday: 5th day
Friday: 6th day
Saturday: 7th day – Jewish Sabbath day.
In the Old Testament Saturday (the seventh day) is proclaimed to be the Sabbath Day, a day of rest and/or religious worship. The early Christian church started observing Sunday as a special day (IIRC, initially this was in addition to Saturday, not in place of it) because that was the day of the week they believed Jesus to have been resurrected on. Later on, Sunday entirely displaced Saturday as a day of worship for Christians (though much later still, some small groups of Christians decided this replacement was unwarranted and that Christians should still follow the Old Testament commandment and observe Saturday, the last day of the week, as a special day of religious observance). However, no Christian church that I’ve ever heard of has ever claimed that the Jews were getting it wrong and that the week really went Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday; ergo, Sunday is the true seventh day and should have been the Sabbath day all along. Instead, Christians maintain that the Sabbath day was changed from Saturday (seventh day) to Sunday (first day); or alternatively that the Old Testament Sabbath day as such has been completely superseded but that Christians observe a special day of worship on Sunday as a memorial to the resurrection of Jesus.
Of course, nowadays in the Western world generally Saturday (day 7) and Sunday (day 1) are off days; technically, by the traditional calendar your “weekend” consists of the last day of Week A and the first day of Week B, with the next “weekend” being the last day of Week B and the first day of Week C. Naturally, people count the two contiguous days off as a single unit of time, the “weekend”, leading to the Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday calendar–but MTWTFSS is an entirely secular, not religious, arrangement of the days of the week.
According to the creation myth in the first chapter of Genesis, yes, God started making things on Sunday, then continued on through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and finished up on Friday, then rested on Saturday.
(Just to further fuck with your head, in Jewish tradition the day does not start at midnight, nor does it start at sunrise; rather each day ends and the next begins at sunset. So, in Atlanta in December, Jewish religious Saturday–the Sabbath day–begins at around 5:30 P.M. on civil Friday; and Jewish religious Saturday ends at around 5:30 P.M. on civil Saturday, with civil Saturday continuing on for another six and a half hours of what is, for Jewish religious purposes, Sunday. Note that in Genesis the consistent refrain is “And there was evening, and there was morning—the nth day.”)
There’s that separation of church and state thing again! I want to be able to buy a Monday thru Sunday calendar instead of having to create them on Excel.
And those days were called that in the Bible?
Oh, no, too late at night for that! 
I’ll see the OP’s pitting and raise it by another of my calendar pet peeves – here in Germany, a common layout is a wide picture over all the dates in the month in one line. What the hell is the point of that? A hint for people who can’t remember that poem about ‘Thirty days hath September,’ etc? The weekend days are usually bolded, but so are holidays, so the effect is one confusing mishmosh that was created specifically to annoy the living crap out of me, personally.
Argh!
In modern Jewish usage and (as far as I know) in the Bible, the’re just referred to as “First Day”, “Second Day”, and so on, except Saturday is called Sabbath Day and not “Seventh Day”. So, English “Tuesday” (“day of the god Tiw”) = Hebrew “Yom Shlishi” (“Third Day”) in the same way English “Tuesday” = French “mardi” (“day of Mars”). There is a very ancient association of days of the week with various pagan gods and the “planets” those gods were astrologically identified with. This went back to ancient Mesopotamia; in the Mediterranean world, this became:
Day One: the day of the Sun
Day Two: the day of the Moon
Day Three: the day of Mars
Day Four: the day of Mercury
Day Five: the day of Jupiter
Day Six: the day of Venus
Day Six: the day of Saturn
with the specific name of a deity like Venus replacing the more-or-less equivalent Babylonian goddess Ishtar.
For something like Italian or French this particular set of names was kept, so you have French *mardi * (“day of Mars”) for our “Tuesday” and mercredi (“day of Mercury”) for our “Wednesday”.
In English we use “Sun-day” and “Mo(o)n-day” without using the personal name of any solar or lunar deities; and we’ve also kept “Satur(n)-day” as is. For the other days of the week, the deities were “translated” from the Greco-Roman pantheon to the Germanic one; sometimes fairly straighforwardly (Roman god of war Mars becomes Germanic god of war Tiw; Roman goddess of love and beauty Venus becomes Germanic goddess of love and beauty Frigg) and other times more oddly (Roman messenger god Mercury becomes Germanic god Wotan, equivalent to the Norse Odin, the chief of all the gods–but Roman chief of the gods Jupiter was identified with the Germanic god Thor; Jupiter and Thor are both thunder-gods, but Thor wasn’t really the divine head honcho of the Germanic pantheon the way Zeus/Jupiter is of the Mediterranean one.)
Blah, blah, blah…I don’t really care which day of the week is the beginning.
But Calenders should be organised so the far left column is a list of SUNDAYS!!
I have three calenders in my house (what can I say, I like pretty pictures) and one of them is like the one in the OP (Mondays first). I HATE IT!! I can’t say how many times this year that calender has fucked my shit up. Sure, I could take it down, but it’s Salvadore Dali, man. I need the surrealism!
Is complaining about a calender’s orientation being disruptive while insisting on the need for surreality in the same paragraph an example of irony?