Posted on 11/18/2004 10:39:06 AM PST by .cnI redruM
Not a very "Christian" response...
What is so hard about it? 100 BC = 100 BCE. 100 AD = 100 CE. Seems simple enough to me.
It's simple. The Gregorian calendar tracks Christian events and time frames. There is no such thing as a "common era". There is the birth of Christ and the time frames tracked from that. For those "offended" by Christ there are a multitude of other dating systems. It is obnoxious to take a dating system use the work and then pretend that the people who originated the system never existed. It's plagerism.
Why?
Aaarrrrgh! That's my pet peeve. You can't do that because the years are not cardinal numbers, they are ordinal numbers. The true style of reflecting a year is the long way, often seen in things like legal documents. i.e. "in the Two-Thousand and Fourth Year of Our Lord"! The first year of Christ's existence was the First Year, the second was the Second, and so forth. It doesn't represent a point in time, but a period in time. Before we settled on Christ's birth as a starting point, the Romans always used someone's counselship, as "in the 5th year of the counsel Gracchus Tiberias Leonidus." But you had to have a list of Roman counsels to determine what was what. Likewise using "the 52nd year of Elizabeth II's reign" would not work very well either. The first year before Christ was born was the First Year B.C., the first year after he was born was the First Year A.D. There is no zeroth year and can never be. You and others have gotten confused over this because hardly anyone uses the ordinal form. The words "Anno Dominae" mean just that "the Year of our Lord" so that 2004 A.D. is the 2004th year since the birth of our Lord.
Years are not cardinal numbers, they are ordinal numbers written without the endings for convenience' sake.
>>>If there's a way to stop this PC madness, I' love to know what it is.
Think, act and behave counter-PC.
So, write and say B.C and A.D. Even when you see it written as BCE and CE, read them as B.C. and A.D. Or, better yet, as another poster suggested, use "in the year of our Lord xx," and "in the year before our Lord xx."
Or we could always date everything from the year of the Hegira (this would be the year 1425).
I like your style. 8-)
I remember being in 5th grade and a classmate was asked what "B.C." stood for. He said (in all seriousness) "Before cavemen?" Yes, we all thought it was hilarious.
They really are insane.
Obviously, there is, as the terminology is widely used.
It is obnoxious to take a dating system use the work and then pretend that the people who originated the system never existed.
There is a perfectly reasonable explanation, given by others on this thread, why that terminology is used. Your being offended by it doesn't change that people are going to use it. Seems a rather trivial thing to get worked up over.
It's plagerism.
Words mean things. Whatever you want to call this, "plagiarism" doesn't apply.
Turn the other cheek, don't be angry with your brother, etc.
I assume this was a public school? ;o)
No, 2 BC/BCE.
GREAT post!!!
Familiar, eh? 8~)
my history professor used that politically correct BS so i started saying "before the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" and "after ......" libs were going nuts while us right-wing, dumb, red state bigots were chuckling.
No it doesn't, since the "BP" scale is measured relative to 1950. And there's nothing PC about it, it was established for practical reasons:
1. So that there would be a single scale for historic measurements. Using AD/BC can be error-prone, since a typo or inadvertently dropping or overlooking the AD/BC designation can throw off results by 2000 years.
2. So that all dates would be on a single scale where all figures are positive numbers, removing the need for error-prone conversions. For example, it's too likely to look at "AD1000" and "1500BC" and think they're 500 years apart if you're not paying enough attention. This is one reason why physicists often prefer the Kelvin temperature scale, where all possible temperatures are positive numbers -- on either the Celsius or Fahrenheit scales, some temperatures will be positive and some will be negative. The AD/BC convention has another calculation complication in that there was no "year 0". AD5 and 5BC are 9 years apart, not 10. On the BP scale, on the other hand, years X and Y are exactly X-Y apart -- quick and easy.
3. Even more importantly, BP dates are usually relative and not absolute, since they most often derive from Carbon-14 or other dating methods. Using "BP" is an implicit reminder that the dates most likely have an "error bar" on them. 3000BP most likely means something like "3000 years before 1950, give or take a few years", whereas the equivalent 1051BC gives the false impression of a precisely known historic calendar date.
4. The majority of BP dates are far enough in the past that the AD/BC designation starts to become irrelevant anyway -- for example 750,000 years BP is long enough ago that it's 748,051BC, which still rounds out to 750,000 any way you look at it.
5. Why 1950? Because the first radiocarbon results were published in December 1949, so the first day of 1950 seemed a good "year zero" for radiocarbon results to be calibrated to so they could be compared and reported consistently. Otherwise you get the "museum guide problem":
Museum guide: "This fossil is 65 million and 4 years old."Another common term for times on a geologic timespan is "MYA", or "millions of years ago".
Museum visitor: "Wow, how did they date it that precisely?"
Museum guide: "Well, it was 65 million years old when I first came to work here four years ago."
Where do these doofus losers come from anyway?
Unfortunately, it seems that some of them come from FreeRepublic.
Electrical Engineers refer to SQRT(-1) as "j".
Physicists refer to SQRT(-1) as "i".
They don't hurl invective at each other over the different terminology.
Many of the proponents of BCE/CE hurl foul invective at those who use BC/AD. I've been on the receiving end of such. You're welcome to tell them to "chill" ... if you think it'll do any good.
Oh, yeah, that'll give people a good impression of Christians...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.