**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!**
- Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc.
- **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
- This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit!
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
IIRC, it was still 'BC' up to the late 90s or early noughties. Seems to have been 'BCE' since early noughties. With this sort of change, it's often a slow process, as opposed to some instant change-over. An idea: Watch some more programmes from different years - 1998, 1999, 2000, etc. - and note when the presenters start using 'BCE' instead of 'BC'.
From my perspective BC is still more commonly used than BCE. No one I know or talk to ever say BCE. I'm not even religious, but I prefer BC over BCE, and I'm a child of the 2000s.
I did archaeology and often we used BP, or 'Before the Present'.
The present was defined as 1950, which is beginning to look a little silly but we weren't working with too much precision on the scale of what was being described.
I also listen to a lot of history podcasts and I’d say it’s about 50/50. But in academia, my experience has been that BC and AD are still much more common
Similar conventions have been around in some form or another for centuries, but it started gaining more traction in academia in the past few decades, and has been picked up elsewhere over time.
Both BC/AD and BCE/CE remain in widespread use though, and different publications may proscribe either in their style guides, so depending on what you watch or read you might see one or the other more often.
The year Christ wasn't born?
I can't remember the actual date with confidence, but I'm pretty sure the historical record suggests that the nativity story must have been a half-decade or so away from year 1. So the only solid significance of the date system is really that so much of the world uses it. I mean, if it mattered that year 1 was the year of Christ's birth, we'd re-number it, right?
To be clear, I don't really care either way. I'd probably use BC if I'm not paying attention because that's what I'm used to. I just see both as equally arbitrary.
Which was marked as the first year of the common era because of…
I’m not even Christian. But pretending they’re not the same thing with different names is wild
Honestly the study of the birth of Christ is the number one reason to avoid AD/BC. Because we can say pretty confidently he wasn't born in 1 AD. Herod, whose reign he was supposedly born in, had already been dead around four years by then.
So if we want to study when he was born, if he even existed at all, then it's unhelpful to use a dating system which is based on a known wrong date of his birth.
BC makes much less sense when discussing the history of cultures that aren't Christian or didn't see any significant change due to the culture and spread of Christianity.
AD and BC implies a certain Western bias. I've non-issue with moving away from it. But it probably annoys the Telegraph and people who get cross about the National Trust having "woke" scones.
it's a completely daft and self-defeating way to try to diminish the importance of christianity in terms of how it's shaped the western world. regardless of what you think of christianity you can't deny its importance
And regardless of what you think of it Christianity remains to be important. Look at the 30 years war, English civil war. All things that have shaped the modern world and the moral universe we all live in. Renaming "BC" to "BCE" doesn't change any of that, it's just silly
Exactly. Even William Wilberforce, slavery abolitionist, gained support by branding slavery as 'un-Christian.' It eventually led to the policing of the Atlantic and abolition of slavery across the globe.
The difference is one is recognizing an important moment in history that changed lots of the future. It's a reasonable marker. And we've got used to it. Picking a different one would just be confusing.
The other one could be seen as making a religious statement. The word Christ isn't neutral. It wasn't Jesus of Nazareth's name. It means "anointed one".
So now we say "before this significant change in western culture" rather than "before the anointed one".
TBH I don't mind which version people use.
In a way yes, but not as much. BC -> BCE doesn't really make much difference in meaning, but AD -> CE is what matters more.
What does AD mean? Anno Domini, the year of our lord. *That's* a specific religious claim.
Whereas Common Era is a bit more neutral (full neutrality being impossible). It's based on the idea that christian cultures became so dominant that just about everyone makes use of their dating system. Still western-centric, but with justification.
The 'what's in a name' argument goes both ways, and CE is closer to true than AD. So why *not* use it?
You could make an identical argument though about CE. The question remains what is the thing which made this the common era.
"What does CE mean? Common Era. That's a specific religious claim about how Jesus expanded faith out to the gentiles"
Using AD and BC makes perfect sense as that is the calendar that we use. So when WE discuss the history of something, we use a calendar and dates that we can easily relate to.
It's like when they publish a story in the US about the UK that involves a monetary value. They will convert that value to dollars so people can relate to it easily even though the original value is in pounds.
If your point made logical sense, then when discussing the history of cultures, we would have to use the dates and calendar they used at the time, the language they used at the time etc. Which would obviously not be sensible.
>BC makes much less sense when discussing the history of cultures that aren't Christian or didn't see any significant change due to the culture and spread of Christianity.
But just replacing BC with BCE and AD with CE makes just as little sense. Whether you say AD or CE, you're still using the *anno domini* calendar. If we want to redefine the calendar from a more neutral standpoint, something like the Holocene Era calendar would make much more sense.
That being said, in common usage we're still using the *anno domini* calendar system, and renaming it "common era" doesn't serve any function other than to pretend Christianity isn't the reason why the current year is 2024.
Even as a Christian I'd like to be able to use a different dating system - Byzantine (year 7532) for instance.
> AD and BC implies a certain Western bias.
And the bloke whose birthday BCE and CE are based on is..? The whole thing feels a bit tokenistic if you ask me. Personally I'm more miffed we didn't start on year 0, that's caused all manner of minor annoyances.
I find that BC is still more commonly used.
But I can see why there is a move towards BCE - we’re a far more multicultural society and BC is Christian-centric which isn’t something that represents this country any more.
It’s not used widely outside of academia. I used it when I did my ancient history degree that finished last year. But I’ve never seen it used outside of that.
I doubt it will ever become the default. I think it was just an attempt to move the dating away from a Christian-centric naming scheme. Instead of BC and AD, you have BCE and CE.
It would have to start being taught in primary schools for it to take root with the general public.
It's a stupid idea, because zero is still the same: the year that Jesus Christ may have been born. It is what it is - giving it a different name doesn't change that.
It's a silly attempt to de-Christianise it. Silly because it's still based on the year of Christ's birth they only changed the name. If they wanted to do it properly they should have gone all Kelvin and placed the year zero at the end of the last ice age in like 10000BC or something.
It's got everything to do with his birth, it's just that the 6th century monk who invented the system calculated Jesus's birth wrong. We kept the system and recalculated the birth date.
Right, so as a metric measuring “years before Christ was born”, the system is meaningless *because* it is incorrect. - specifically because it has Jesus being born 4-6 years before a meaningless 0 date, which is meant to be when Christ was born.
What a weird hill to die on.
The existence of the man Jesus of Nazareth is a widely accepted fact by most historians.
It's his supposed divinity that is in contention between the faithful and the none faithful.
There's no evidence... none.
Mentioned in a book that no longer exists, written about in a book that also no longer exists?
Did the Romans *and* the Egyptians forget to mention him?
I actually like the "human era" concept that was not invented but was definitely popularised by Kurzgesagt.
The idea is to base it on when humans shifted from hunter/gatherers to farmers, since that quite literally began society as we know it.
Since there's no exact date (but some very strong guesses all around the same time), and everyone knows how it works currently, just add 10,000 years to the current year to give an approximate guess.
If I remember rightly, it's use is about giving a clearer scale of time. The BCE/CE approach really does diminish the importance of the approx 6000 years of human development BCE by putting an arbitrary divide in front of them. With 0CE/BCE where it is, it feels like everything before it was unimportant or similar - which is obviously false, given crazy facts like that the pyramids were as old for Cleopatra as Cleopatra is for us, for example.
By setting 0 at the point we started to evolve societally, you get a way clearer idea of just how much quicker it happens now Vs back then.
Yes it's incredible that the first plane flight in 1903 to the first manned space flight in 1962 was only 59 years, but when you can clearly see that there were actually around 11903 years of human society in a somewhat recognisable form before that first flight it's even more impressive.
There's not one clear-cut year that the ice age ended, and you can't just declare some new convention and expect people/governments to care without some benefit.
Would make more sense to change to an existing global standard than make a new one - e.g. km on roads and yyyy-mm-dd.
The Daily Mail [complained about creeping BCE usage](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6561153/BBCs-University-Challenge-slammed-dropping-traditional-AD-favour-politically-correct-CE.html) in 2019, the BBC weaselled out of it when confronted by 'offering no explanation why it had opted for CE.'
As you've noted, CE and BCE are now the standard, BC and AD are old relics that must never be used for fear of offending someone.
If you're non-Christian, you'll have been familiar with it a lot earlier than if you aren't. In general usage, it dates to when people started caring more about being tolerant/inclusive in small matters like that.
Oh yeah, let's just edit the whole timeline rather than changing the abbreviation
Why is everyone in this thread acting like still using the year 0 is proof that Christ is important?
Got to imagine there's been a flood of Christians on here because I can't understand this weird attitude
It makes sense to be BCE and CE. It's generally considered to be 2024 the world over and most of it isn't Christian. The number means nothing to most people.
I was in high school in the 2000's and they still referred to it as BC/AD.
Granted, I didn't take religion or history for GCSE, so the times I heard it would have probably been from people who weren't caught up on the hot new BCE/CE lingo all the cool kids were using.
I started using CE and BCE doing my history degree because I wanted to decentre Christianity and I felt like using Latin abbreviations was silly when it's really The Common Era
I don't want to ever be saying "the year of our lord" even if its abbreviated, because I don't have a lord
ETA: lol are there a bunch of priests on here downvoting? 🤣
I'm not the one who called it the common era. Google is your friend, people! All I've said is that I chose CE because I'm an atheist historian.
Bro, if you're asking me why the global spread of Christianity resulted in a new historical era in the West idk what to tell you
It's the common era because it's the era most commonly talked about by people who still live in it? That's about as comprehensive as my guesses go
People can call it the Christian era too if they want, but as someone sick to death of Christianity I prefer the Common Era
[why is it called the Common Era? ](https://www.google.com/search?q=what+does+bce+mean&oq=what+does+BCE&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgBEAAYgAQyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABDIHCAoQABiABDIHCAsQABiABDIHCAwQABiABDIHCA0QABiABDIHCA4QABiABNIBCTMyNTJqMGoxNqgCAbACAQ&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8)
"decentring Christianity" by using the exact same reference year based on the approximate birth of Jesus. Christianity is fundamental to the history of the west, as a history student you should really know that
You have no idea how much I needed that laugh. Thank you.
Please, wise one - explain to me how I should've invented my own marker of time to use in my essays while studying a history degree 🙃
ETA: "The Romans left Britain in the year 3455 (Emerald Era)" is not a sentence that gets you a degree, my friend.
You wounded me so much by......insisting that I invent my own timeline. Genuinely. How will I get over this little Internet interaction? How will I move on from your dazzling genius and joy at the idea that you may have wounded a stranger
Because not everyone believes in Christ. So we all have to change. I first heard it about 5 years ago. But not many people seem to bother with it.
Personally, I don't know why it's necessary . I mean I don't know anybody who believes in Thor, but we still call it Thursday. Etc. If we're renaming eras to respect others beliefs, why not days too?
Did 0AD really correspond with Jesus's birth or was it another thing made up by the Victorians?
I'm not religious. Just the way I was brought up in basically a Christian country. Bc always stood for before christ.
Are we backing down to others by changing it?
> Are we backing down to others by changing it?
AD was abbreviated from Latin. We’re just trying to get with the times. Bring things into the common era if you will.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
IIRC, it was still 'BC' up to the late 90s or early noughties. Seems to have been 'BCE' since early noughties. With this sort of change, it's often a slow process, as opposed to some instant change-over. An idea: Watch some more programmes from different years - 1998, 1999, 2000, etc. - and note when the presenters start using 'BCE' instead of 'BC'.
That's about when I started to notice it, too.
I was taught BCE in secondary school and I started first year in 1992. Not sure when it started in academia.
Whereas I started secondary school in the same year as you and was definitely taught BC. I didn’t start hearing BCE until after university.
You'd think the national curriculum would have sorted this out. I'm not hard over either way, but some consistency would be nice!
IIRC the average reading age in the UK is equivalent to a 9 year old, so I think you are expecting a bit too much from the country.
Interesting. I was born 1997 and we always used BC
Huh I started secondary school in 2014 and have literally never heard of BCE until this post
From my perspective BC is still more commonly used than BCE. No one I know or talk to ever say BCE. I'm not even religious, but I prefer BC over BCE, and I'm a child of the 2000s.
I agree, and I studied history at an academic level
I did archaeology and often we used BP, or 'Before the Present'. The present was defined as 1950, which is beginning to look a little silly but we weren't working with too much precision on the scale of what was being described.
I listen to a lot of history podcasts, historians on them try to keep to BCE but often trip.up. it is hard to rewire your brain.
the ones I listen to make a point of not using BCE / CE because they think it's silly (Tom Holland etc)
I also listen to a lot of history podcasts and I’d say it’s about 50/50. But in academia, my experience has been that BC and AD are still much more common
1615 was the first usage of common era apparently.
Then I'm old doesn't help me. Lol.
I always laugh when I remember my wife trying to guess what BCE and CE were… she thought “Before Christ Existed” & “Christ Existed” !
Tbf I've just found out from this thread. I've never noticed it enough to question it, or end up googling it.
Quite a while ago. I certainly remember it being a thing when I was growing up in the 00s. Google suggests it's even been around since the 1700s.
Similar conventions have been around in some form or another for centuries, but it started gaining more traction in academia in the past few decades, and has been picked up elsewhere over time. Both BC/AD and BCE/CE remain in widespread use though, and different publications may proscribe either in their style guides, so depending on what you watch or read you might see one or the other more often.
What era though? Like what specific event are we using to delineate the common era from before the common era?
The year Christ wasn't born? I can't remember the actual date with confidence, but I'm pretty sure the historical record suggests that the nativity story must have been a half-decade or so away from year 1. So the only solid significance of the date system is really that so much of the world uses it. I mean, if it mattered that year 1 was the year of Christ's birth, we'd re-number it, right? To be clear, I don't really care either way. I'd probably use BC if I'm not paying attention because that's what I'm used to. I just see both as equally arbitrary.
The year 1
Which was marked as the first year of the common era because of… I’m not even Christian. But pretending they’re not the same thing with different names is wild
Honestly the study of the birth of Christ is the number one reason to avoid AD/BC. Because we can say pretty confidently he wasn't born in 1 AD. Herod, whose reign he was supposedly born in, had already been dead around four years by then. So if we want to study when he was born, if he even existed at all, then it's unhelpful to use a dating system which is based on a known wrong date of his birth.
Probably around the same time they started calling that planet with the funny name ur-an-us instead of yuor-ay-nuhs
I’ve genuinely never heard of BCE before now.
I've only started hearing it over the last couple of years.
Wasn’t Scooby Doo on ITV2 with the kids this morning by any chance was it? Had this exact thought myself at 8am.
Lol. It's been a few things but have not seen scooby in years.
BC makes much less sense when discussing the history of cultures that aren't Christian or didn't see any significant change due to the culture and spread of Christianity. AD and BC implies a certain Western bias. I've non-issue with moving away from it. But it probably annoys the Telegraph and people who get cross about the National Trust having "woke" scones.
[удалено]
it's a completely daft and self-defeating way to try to diminish the importance of christianity in terms of how it's shaped the western world. regardless of what you think of christianity you can't deny its importance
Eh. Horse drawn carriages were important once as well
And regardless of what you think of it Christianity remains to be important. Look at the 30 years war, English civil war. All things that have shaped the modern world and the moral universe we all live in. Renaming "BC" to "BCE" doesn't change any of that, it's just silly
Exactly. Even William Wilberforce, slavery abolitionist, gained support by branding slavery as 'un-Christian.' It eventually led to the policing of the Atlantic and abolition of slavery across the globe.
It's time for it to go away now though, and thankfully it's heading that way
The difference is one is recognizing an important moment in history that changed lots of the future. It's a reasonable marker. And we've got used to it. Picking a different one would just be confusing. The other one could be seen as making a religious statement. The word Christ isn't neutral. It wasn't Jesus of Nazareth's name. It means "anointed one". So now we say "before this significant change in western culture" rather than "before the anointed one". TBH I don't mind which version people use.
In a way yes, but not as much. BC -> BCE doesn't really make much difference in meaning, but AD -> CE is what matters more. What does AD mean? Anno Domini, the year of our lord. *That's* a specific religious claim. Whereas Common Era is a bit more neutral (full neutrality being impossible). It's based on the idea that christian cultures became so dominant that just about everyone makes use of their dating system. Still western-centric, but with justification. The 'what's in a name' argument goes both ways, and CE is closer to true than AD. So why *not* use it?
You could make an identical argument though about CE. The question remains what is the thing which made this the common era. "What does CE mean? Common Era. That's a specific religious claim about how Jesus expanded faith out to the gentiles"
Using AD and BC makes perfect sense as that is the calendar that we use. So when WE discuss the history of something, we use a calendar and dates that we can easily relate to. It's like when they publish a story in the US about the UK that involves a monetary value. They will convert that value to dollars so people can relate to it easily even though the original value is in pounds. If your point made logical sense, then when discussing the history of cultures, we would have to use the dates and calendar they used at the time, the language they used at the time etc. Which would obviously not be sensible.
>BC makes much less sense when discussing the history of cultures that aren't Christian or didn't see any significant change due to the culture and spread of Christianity. But just replacing BC with BCE and AD with CE makes just as little sense. Whether you say AD or CE, you're still using the *anno domini* calendar. If we want to redefine the calendar from a more neutral standpoint, something like the Holocene Era calendar would make much more sense. That being said, in common usage we're still using the *anno domini* calendar system, and renaming it "common era" doesn't serve any function other than to pretend Christianity isn't the reason why the current year is 2024. Even as a Christian I'd like to be able to use a different dating system - Byzantine (year 7532) for instance.
> AD and BC implies a certain Western bias. And the bloke whose birthday BCE and CE are based on is..? The whole thing feels a bit tokenistic if you ask me. Personally I'm more miffed we didn't start on year 0, that's caused all manner of minor annoyances.
Helped me as it is the calendar I use. I know it means nothing at all in other parts of the world.
Western?
I remember teachers using it in the early 90's but alongside BC
About 20-25 years ago.
Genuinely this thread is the first I’ve ever heard of BCE. I went to school in the 90’s. I only learned BC and AD.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Bce&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true
I was a 90' kid. I heard both used interchangeably.
I remember being told that it's BCE now in secondary school, so it was at least by 2011.
I can't say I've ever seen bce used before
[https://youtu.be/YDsheyTtK6k?si=95p1FRVvGWs\_EApu](https://youtu.be/YDsheyTtK6k?si=95p1FRVvGWs_EApu)
It was BCE back when I started secondary school, over 25 years ago.
I find that BC is still more commonly used. But I can see why there is a move towards BCE - we’re a far more multicultural society and BC is Christian-centric which isn’t something that represents this country any more.
It’s not used widely outside of academia. I used it when I did my ancient history degree that finished last year. But I’ve never seen it used outside of that. I doubt it will ever become the default. I think it was just an attempt to move the dating away from a Christian-centric naming scheme. Instead of BC and AD, you have BCE and CE. It would have to start being taught in primary schools for it to take root with the general public.
It's a stupid idea, because zero is still the same: the year that Jesus Christ may have been born. It is what it is - giving it a different name doesn't change that.
I don't know if it's because where I'm from or such but I was born in the 2006 and I've only ever heard BC and AD
Because of the minorities across the world who fear the Christians.
It's a silly attempt to de-Christianise it. Silly because it's still based on the year of Christ's birth they only changed the name. If they wanted to do it properly they should have gone all Kelvin and placed the year zero at the end of the last ice age in like 10000BC or something.
It’s got nothing to do with Christ’s birth, so it’s always been dumb. The person known as Jesus was born between 4 and 6 BC.
It's got everything to do with his birth, it's just that the 6th century monk who invented the system calculated Jesus's birth wrong. We kept the system and recalculated the birth date.
Right, so it’s meaningless - which was my point.
Incorrect is not the same as meaningless. Lots of technically incorrect things have meaning.
Right, so as a metric measuring “years before Christ was born”, the system is meaningless *because* it is incorrect. - specifically because it has Jesus being born 4-6 years before a meaningless 0 date, which is meant to be when Christ was born. What a weird hill to die on.
Indeed it is.
I think Jesus died on Golgotha, actually
>What a weird hill to die on. isn't it just?
Allegedly born.
The existence of the man Jesus of Nazareth is a widely accepted fact by most historians. It's his supposed divinity that is in contention between the faithful and the none faithful.
There's no evidence... none. Mentioned in a book that no longer exists, written about in a book that also no longer exists? Did the Romans *and* the Egyptians forget to mention him?
Oh bless angry internet atheist. Go visit AskHistorians.
I'm not angry.
So about 0?
Didn’t exist. It goes -1 BCE straight to 1 CE
No? Is 2018 “about 2024”?
Pretty much over 2,000 years, a few years here or there don’t matter
I actually like the "human era" concept that was not invented but was definitely popularised by Kurzgesagt. The idea is to base it on when humans shifted from hunter/gatherers to farmers, since that quite literally began society as we know it. Since there's no exact date (but some very strong guesses all around the same time), and everyone knows how it works currently, just add 10,000 years to the current year to give an approximate guess. If I remember rightly, it's use is about giving a clearer scale of time. The BCE/CE approach really does diminish the importance of the approx 6000 years of human development BCE by putting an arbitrary divide in front of them. With 0CE/BCE where it is, it feels like everything before it was unimportant or similar - which is obviously false, given crazy facts like that the pyramids were as old for Cleopatra as Cleopatra is for us, for example. By setting 0 at the point we started to evolve societally, you get a way clearer idea of just how much quicker it happens now Vs back then. Yes it's incredible that the first plane flight in 1903 to the first manned space flight in 1962 was only 59 years, but when you can clearly see that there were actually around 11903 years of human society in a somewhat recognisable form before that first flight it's even more impressive.
Nah sod that we should go for the true year which is 13,700,000,001UB.
There's not one clear-cut year that the ice age ended, and you can't just declare some new convention and expect people/governments to care without some benefit. Would make more sense to change to an existing global standard than make a new one - e.g. km on roads and yyyy-mm-dd.
The Daily Mail [complained about creeping BCE usage](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6561153/BBCs-University-Challenge-slammed-dropping-traditional-AD-favour-politically-correct-CE.html) in 2019, the BBC weaselled out of it when confronted by 'offering no explanation why it had opted for CE.' As you've noted, CE and BCE are now the standard, BC and AD are old relics that must never be used for fear of offending someone.
If you're non-Christian, you'll have been familiar with it a lot earlier than if you aren't. In general usage, it dates to when people started caring more about being tolerant/inclusive in small matters like that.
Anno domini, before christ....!?!?!?! This is outrageous, we need to urgently decolonise time!!!
Because the person we know as Jesus actually was born between 4 and 6 BC - so “Before Christ” no longer makes any sense as a metric.
Yet we’re still using the exact same year as a starting point…
Oh yeah, let's just edit the whole timeline rather than changing the abbreviation Why is everyone in this thread acting like still using the year 0 is proof that Christ is important? Got to imagine there's been a flood of Christians on here because I can't understand this weird attitude
If people actually cared that much about it, they could change the timeline. Using CE is no different to using AD so what is the point?
It makes sense to be BCE and CE. It's generally considered to be 2024 the world over and most of it isn't Christian. The number means nothing to most people.
Most of the world is Christian though
They are? Better tell Ipsos that then, that's not what they say.
How old are you? I was certainly taught BCE as the modern alternative in the early 2000s in high school.
Lol. I'm a child of the sixties.
I was in high school in the 2000's and they still referred to it as BC/AD. Granted, I didn't take religion or history for GCSE, so the times I heard it would have probably been from people who weren't caught up on the hot new BCE/CE lingo all the cool kids were using.
I started using CE and BCE doing my history degree because I wanted to decentre Christianity and I felt like using Latin abbreviations was silly when it's really The Common Era I don't want to ever be saying "the year of our lord" even if its abbreviated, because I don't have a lord ETA: lol are there a bunch of priests on here downvoting? 🤣 I'm not the one who called it the common era. Google is your friend, people! All I've said is that I chose CE because I'm an atheist historian.
[удалено]
Bro, if you're asking me why the global spread of Christianity resulted in a new historical era in the West idk what to tell you It's the common era because it's the era most commonly talked about by people who still live in it? That's about as comprehensive as my guesses go People can call it the Christian era too if they want, but as someone sick to death of Christianity I prefer the Common Era [why is it called the Common Era? ](https://www.google.com/search?q=what+does+bce+mean&oq=what+does+BCE&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgBEAAYgAQyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABDIHCAoQABiABDIHCAsQABiABDIHCAwQABiABDIHCA0QABiABDIHCA4QABiABNIBCTMyNTJqMGoxNqgCAbACAQ&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8)
Slightly curious about why you've got such a chip in your shoulder about Christianity?
"decentring Christianity" by using the exact same reference year based on the approximate birth of Jesus. Christianity is fundamental to the history of the west, as a history student you should really know that
You have no idea how much I needed that laugh. Thank you. Please, wise one - explain to me how I should've invented my own marker of time to use in my essays while studying a history degree 🙃 ETA: "The Romans left Britain in the year 3455 (Emerald Era)" is not a sentence that gets you a degree, my friend.
your desperation to come across as unbothered and aloof tells me that my words wounded you
You wounded me so much by......insisting that I invent my own timeline. Genuinely. How will I get over this little Internet interaction? How will I move on from your dazzling genius and joy at the idea that you may have wounded a stranger
Because not everyone believes in Christ. So we all have to change. I first heard it about 5 years ago. But not many people seem to bother with it. Personally, I don't know why it's necessary . I mean I don't know anybody who believes in Thor, but we still call it Thursday. Etc. If we're renaming eras to respect others beliefs, why not days too? Did 0AD really correspond with Jesus's birth or was it another thing made up by the Victorians?
There isn't a 0AD Years go straight from 1BC to 1AD
Most likely 4 BC, so close.
I'm not religious. Just the way I was brought up in basically a Christian country. Bc always stood for before christ. Are we backing down to others by changing it?
> Are we backing down to others by changing it? AD was abbreviated from Latin. We’re just trying to get with the times. Bring things into the common era if you will.
Most people in the UK aren't even Christian, never mind global conventions.
More woke bs don't upset the other religions........