It might have been conceived that way originally. But the switch to using CE rather than AD reflects a move away from the religious context to a numerically equivalent one. Even if you still believe that the purpose of our calendar system is to measure elapsed time since Christ’s birthday, clearly (as you say) there is no evidence that it’s accurate (or even that Christ existed). A claim that the new millennium does not start on Jan 1st 2000 because only 999 years have passed since the birth of Christ has no historical foundation.
The two rules of CT world:
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Ignore all the actual evidence. It just gets in the way.
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Dream up a bunch of hypotheses and label them as facts. Clearly this is more “rigorous” than heeding the actual data which is just a bunch of Scientism mumbo-jumbo.
Much irony here.
Outside of the scientific community, nobody in America seems to use BCE/CE. I’d venture that 80% have no idea what the terms mean, and half of those who do are violently against it. That public opinion overwhelmingly favors BC/AD is similar to public opinion thinking millennia end in years with three zeros.
Why does public opinion get applauded for preferring the three zeros? Doing so is saying that the meaning of millennium is less important than what makes you feel good. How is that different from any other non-scientific redefinition of reality - including at the far extreme that three hundreds years of history didn’t exist.
I’m not saying there’s a slippery slope from one to the other. However, the spectrum does manifest itself in multiple ways, all of which are bad.
Basically, it depends on whether cardinal rather than ordinal numbers are used (e.g. “the 1800s” cover the years 1800-1899; “the 19th century” covers the years 1801-1900).
I don’t accept your premise that the millennium begins in 2001 is “scientific reality”, since the purpose of the calendar system is not to measure elapsed time from some well-defined starting point in the past. The fact that only a small minority agree with your view on when we should celebrate the millennium is because you are wrong, not because the majority who disagree with you are ignorant and “science” is on your side.
I’d venture that they do have an idea: that one means Christian Era, and the other Before Christian Era.
The calendar does measure time since a defined starting point. Ask anyone.
I can certainly imagine that it’s possible to ask that question in a manner that most people would answer yes. And also in a manner that they would answer no.
But in reality, when someone writes down the year as 2022, are they thinking “gosh, it’s 2022 years since Jeebus was born; hold on, no, it’s 2021 years isn’t it”? At the turn of the millennium, were people partying to celebrate the notion that exactly 2000 years had passed since the birth of Jeebus?
If the way we label our years really signifies the elapsed time since the birth of Jeebus, don’t you think that at some point prior to 1999 somebody would have suggested that the numerical value of the year be adjusted by 1 to make it less confusing?
In addition to astronomy, there’s also dendrochronology, dating past events by counting tree rings. You can get back a few tens of thousands of years that way, by matching up ring patterns from different trees. Three hundred missing years is also enough that it’d be visible in carbon dating.
As for the millennium question, the simple solution is to just hold two parties, one on the impressive-looking date, and then one a year later on the correct date. Who can argue with throwing more parties?
They were celebrating that the odometer rolled over to a shiny round number. Nothing more and nothing less.
We’re far enough down that number line that whatever did or didn’t happen whenever back roughly 2K years ago is immaterial. In that sense, “years” are like “degrees”: they’re a more or less arbitrary-sized unit with a more or less arbitrarily-placed origin.
We can call the freezing point of water zero or we can call it 32 and either way right now its 5 F-degrees warmer at noon than at midnight.
Exactly. Something that happens once per thousand years, and which is thus perfectly sensibly called the turn of the millennium.
That’s part of why I celebrate May 17th. It only comes once a year.
Tomorrow as I type will be Aug 8 2022. It’s been a millennium since Aug 8 1022 came by (ignoring any intervening calendric overhauls).
I think that calls for a major celebration. A millennial one in fact. Does anyone know any cute Millennials in my zip code I could ask out to the party?
Some people absolutely did. There’s no getting around that in American culture years are labeled Before Christ/Anno Domini. The people who believe will point to that.
My subjective opinion is most others were celebrating the odometer turning over. (WOW. Ninjaed on that!) They were celebrating the end of the 1000s and the beginning of the 2000s. That’s a perfectly valid cultural celebration, and the word millennium has shifted to accommodate it. A bit of research will reveal that that’s a fairly modern adaptation. The beginning of centuries have not always been celebrated on Jan 1, xx00.
People have been lamenting the lack of a zero year for centuries. It will not get changed, and the use of BCE/CE doesn’t change it either. That’s an irrelevant bit of academic trivia.
How urgent is this? I know a cute 999-year-old.
I guess I sorta deserved that one, didn’t I? Some setups just deserve to be swatted out of the park. Touché.
I guess it’s pointless for me to dispute this, because I’m sure you can find someone who once lamented it.
But in any event, as I said above, since Jan 1st 0001 corresponds to no significant historical event whatsoever, why can’t we satisfy the annoying people who want us to wait until 2001 to celebrate by simply saying that an alternative label for year BCE 1 is CE 0?
But if you’re saying that the turn of prior centuries was widely celebrated on Jan 1 xx01, I’ll need a cite for that, please. I don’t know that you are wrong, but I’ve never heard this claim before.
Hillel Schwartz, Century’s End, 1990.
Which claims what? I see no mention of anything about people celebrating turning centuries on Jan 1st XX01 in the two or three synopses of the book’s content I can find. I do see mention of the year 1000 and the “papal jubilee” of 1300.
P. 193.
Outside Germany, however, and its colonial possessions, few were the festivities on the eve of January 1, 1900… This time around, logicians and officialdom had their victory. … The Christian Science Journal, whose editorship had supposed, “for reasons quite satisfactory to ourselves, that we had entered the Twentieth Century” on the first day of 1900, apologized on the first day of 1901, since “Our governmental authorities officially postponed the beginning of the new century until this year.”
The “postponement” made for celebrations on January 1, 1901, more extensive and elaborate than for any earlier century’s turn.
Could you, in return, cite your research for the opposite?
Well, the extent of my ressearch is reading the paragraph you quoted, which says
This time around, logicians and officialdom had their victory
And describes waiting until January 1st 1901 as a “postponement”. Which suggests to me that this was notable because it was contrary to the usual practice.
In any event, I’m certainly not suggesting that there were never people who imagined that we were counting the exact elapsed time since the birth of Christ. Of course there were religiously-motivated people with such obsessions, including trying to predict the exact date of the Second Coming. But we know that this has no historical foundation, and it is not the usual purpose of our calendar.