BCE

[Hubie]

You nailed it. Good job.

Thanks.



Wait, are you making fun of me now?

[marv]

I grew up with "Before Christ" and "Anno Domini". If that's good enough for this atheist, it's good enough for Christians.

Why not just start the calendar with the "Big Bang"

[Hubie]

Why not just start the calendar with the "Big Bang"

Phooey. Let's pay tribute to how DU members think and start the calendar when they think history began: January 20, 2001.

[Chuck58]

As far as I'm concerned it's AD and BC.

Also, I grew up with inches, feet, yards, pints, quarts, gallons, pecks etc and I'm not interested in learning metric anything.

[Adam Wood]

BCE has been in wide use by historians and theologians for quite some time (about 400 years' time). The reason for the BCE designation as opposed to AD/BC is that a careful study of a lot of historical documents tells us that Jesus was actually born, based upon our current BC/AD calendar, somewhere between 4 and 7 BC, not right at year #1. Furthermore, if the split between BC and AD is the moment of Jesus' birth, then New Year's Day would be December 25 (but for the fact that Jesus was almost certainly born in the spring and not December). In short, for the purposes of exacting history study, AD/BC really isn't a very good measure, nor, indeed, is the moment of Jesus' birth, since no one really knows quite when that was. BCE is a scientific, historical designation for the purpose of scientific and historical research. There is nothing about it that in any way disses Christians or Christianity.

The first time I heard the term BCE was in my New Testament class at my very fundamentalist Baptist university, from a professor who was just this side of a snake-handler. This man took offense at Halloween, but he was perfectly fine with the use of BCE. If there was any Christian on earth who could find a valid reason to feel insulted by the BCE designation, this man would have been it.




The notion that it is some sort of moonbattery designed to insult or belittle Christians and/or Christianity just doesn't hold up.

[Generation Why?]

I grew up with "Before Christ" and "Anno Domini". If that's good enough for this atheist, it's good enough for Christians.

Why not just start the calendar with the "Big Bang"

It is. Spoiler alert: The majority of us hate those idiots who try to find a lawsuit in anything doing with "Under God" or "In God We Trust"