Dating systems: BC and AD, or BCE and CE?

[caiusbeerquitius]

Quintus, I will try to make my personal point clear.

BC/AD and BCE/CE are the same thing, both with the same religious reference point. I always thought that the BCE/CE thing was a bunch of crapload designed to please a political-correctness crowd that seems to be offended by anything and everything. Same thing as calling someone who's deaf "hearing-impaired" or a dwarf "vertically-challenged"... Bullshit, if you ask me. It's like every word we use nowadays is offending, so we need to create another language.

I think this depends on the environment you are in. If you try to follow Kant´s Categorical Imperative it seems logical to not use the BC / AD system in the unversity seminar room. At least here, since Christians are normally a minority in these rooms. As a teacher I suspect I should be "neutral", especially as a history teacher, since History of Religions is also part of the subject. I would happily use an other dating system, but since the textbooks my students work with are using this chronology, it would be rather confusing them, if I used other dates, which would end in very silly statements and test results. Also, I do not understand what the problem is. Everybody understands what is meant with CE or BCE, so the message apparently works. I could equally start complaining that different languages exist. How dares one use the word "Kindergarten" in english, where you could use "Children´s Garden" as well. That is how language works, it changes all the time #dialects, #new words etc. That´s how history works. It is change. So, all I can see in your argument is some kind of unnecessary conservatism. I see it a bit more chilled, and do not really mind. I could call a cow a pig, if the person I talk to understands what is meant, it doesn´t really matter.

I wouldn't care if the calendar system would be based on the birth of Mohammed or the death of Bob the super-alien, as long as a system allows everybody to put events on the same timescale. That people like it or not, religion is part of human history and of the fabric of human experience, so trying to get it out of history is revisionism in its worst form. Using BC/AD doesn't force-convert people, it just aknowledges the historical fact that a certain culture, of Christian tradition, used that system for a long time and this relic has become a standard.

I fully agree. But why is it necessary to acknowledge? The terms we use alway influence our thinking. Already Sokrates made this very clear back then in Athens. If I want to be be an as-objective-as-possible worker on history related subjects, I should use neutral terms. As an example: "Samnite Wars" vs. "Roman-Samnite Wars" or "Punic Wars" vs. "Roman-Carthaginian Wars". etc... the use of biased terms has always influenced the way historians and archaeologists viewed the past. Stronger examples are "Theodosius the Great" or "Julian the Apostate", eg.

If this relic has to be rejected because of modern sensibilities, then what's the point of studying archaeology and history in the first place, since most of what we'll discover will be foreign to modern sensibilities?

Sorry, but this to me is a non sequitur. Also: This relic is not (as I have shown above) rejected because of modern sensibilities, at least in the academia, I don´t know about the atheists, but out of good reasons. Also, the term as such is "incorrect" as I said above, it then should be sthg. like 1991AD => 1991 ADAWCW7YO or so, and that would be clumsy.

The atheist defence/connotation of BCE/CE is also biased as by its definition, atheism is also a belief. So we would just replace one belief by another, which seems in vogue and more acceptable in the current era, but which might very well fall out of disfavour sometime in the future

I am not in favour of organized atheism, but I would like to point out one thing, since what you write in your first sentence is repeated everywhere and always, but repetition does not make it correct.

Compare the two sentences:
I do not eat apples. <=> I do not believe in XY.
Then these two:
Not eating apples is a belief <=> Not believing in XY is a belief.

Clearly atheism, defined as "Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities." (WP) is not a belief. It may be a mind-setting, a philosophy or whatever, but it is not a belief (Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true., also from WP) Unless you re-define the terms from the common sense to sthg else. But then you would do exactly the same thing as those do who change the terminology for BC and AD, to BCE and CE, no... wait. They don´t redefine, they just re-label.

As to your second sentence, well, it was always and ever en vogue, so it is not a modern phenomenon. That is why there are so many different beliefs and religions.

Anyway, please do not take this as a personal attack, just in case. I just wanted to summarize my view an what you wrote. I of course respect you point of view, and can partially understand it. It has a lot to do from what point of view and under which circumstances you use the terms, methinks. mile: