Posted on 11/18/2004 10:39:06 AM PST by .cnI redruM
Our civilization is suffering what could be called a cultural death by a thousand cuts. The open sores are ubiquitous, but what happens to irk me at this moment is that quite some time ago I learned that my birth date is not what my parents always told me it was. Moreover, no one else’s is either. You see, those who are contemptuous of tradition have decided to take it upon themselves to change our calendar and replace B.C. [Before Christ] and A.D. [Anno Domini] with B.C.E. [Before the Common Era] and C.E. [The Common Era].
The latter two designations probably aren’t new to you, since they have found favor with pseudo-intellectual academics and seem to be in every new documentary and in many new books. And if you’re taking the time to read this, the reasoning behind their adoption probably isn’t new to you either. The idea is that B.C. and A.D. are reflective of Christianity, and since not everyone is Christian, it’s insensitive and religio-centric to use them. Well, mercy me! We’ll just have to relegate our culture to the dustbin of history lest we offend someone with our existence. After all, it’s obviously better to perish as a civilization than to meet our maker with the burden of having offended someone weighing on our souls.
All joking aside, their reasoning is the epitome of specious logic. B.C. and A.D. certainly are reflective of Christianity, but everything is reflective of something. For instance, since we’re talking about our calendar, it’s instructive to note that every single month’s name is of Roman origin. A few examples: July and August were named after Julius and Augustus Caesar. January and March were named after Janus and Mars, the Roman pagan gods of war, and of gates and doors and entrances and exits, respectively. September, November and December are named after the Latin [which was the language the Romans spoke] words for seven, nine and ten, respectively. Should we rename our months? After all, relatively few people are of Roman descent.
Then there’s the fact that we use the Roman alphabet [although they learned it from the Etruscans] and Arabic numerals [invented by the Hindus, most likely]. Yet, I never hear anyone say that we should dispense with those designations because they might offend those not of Roman, Etruscan, Arabic or Hindu lineage. Or, how about the fact that English, which is spoken in all corners of the Earth now, bears the name of a people on a small island in the Atlantic?
And what about our cities and states? Many of them bear names that are reflective of Christian influence: Los Angeles [the Angels], Sacramento [the Sacraments] and Corpus Christi [the Body of Christ], to name a few. But, then, some are reflective of French influence, such as Baton Rouge and Louisiana; some are reflective of American Indian influence, such as Chappaqua, Saratoga, Illinois, Texas and twenty-five other states; some are reflective of Spanish influence, such as Palo Alto, Los Alamos and over two-thousand other places. And, of course, there’s the fact that our country was named after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci. There go those Italians again, hogging all the influence.
Methinks much offense can be taken, so some remedial action is in order. Here are my suggestions: our months should be renamed and referred to as “Common Month One,” “Common Month Two,” etc. Then, our alphabet can be called “the Common Alphabet,” our numbers “the Common Numerals” and English “the Common Language.” Then we must resolve to rename our states “Common State One,” “Common State two,” all the way up to fifty, assigning them the Common Numbers based on the order in which they entered our Common Union. The end of this good start – but only the beginning of a journey toward total sensitivity – will be to take the lead among nations and rename America “Common Nation 192.” Why Common Number 192? Well, that’s how many nations exist at present, and we wouldn’t want to be so insensitive as to take Common Number One for ourselves simply because we were so privileged as to be sensitive first. Now, I don’t expect other nations to follow suit immediately, but I reckon that when our common-sense extends across the Common Oceans and to the common folk, Common Continents one through six will become sensitized to sensitivity.
But my sense of whimsy has gotten the better of me. So, let’s transition from the ridiculous to the sublime . . . about the ridiculous. In reality, none of the above would work because the salient point is, once again, that EVERYTHING is reflective of something. If you’re going to name something the Common Era, you must ask, common to whom? After all, our calendar [the Gregorian] is not the only one in existence. Jews, the Eastern Orthodox Churches, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians and others have their own calendars, and I’m confident that we could find some devout Jews and Muslims who would maintain that our Gregorian calendar isn’t common to them.
Of course, the question that most begs to be asked here is, what event are we dating the Common Era from? Answer: the approximate birth date of Jesus of Nazareth! To try to obscure that fact and erase our past by manipulating terminology is dishonest, and is another example of the most invidious sort of revisionist history. Moreover, the reasoning behind this element of social-engineering is so flawed and involves such an obvious double-standard that it could only be accepted by second-rate minds. It so drips of contempt for tradition and Christianity that it could only be truly palatable to a bigot. That’s why it may seem ironic that it was originated by a few theologians, but it isn’t really. For, there are some ideas that are so irreligious that only a theologian could think of them.
Before I conclude, I must add that you don’t have to be religious to consider this change to be an affront; you simply have to be an American who cares about his culture and traditions. And we should be mindful of the fact that other nations do not share the disordered compulsion to relinquish their culture for fear of offending others. Now, the question is, since taking this leaf out of their book is a prerequisite for our national survival, do we have the capacity to cultivate the same strength in ourselves?
Well, a good first step toward that goal is understanding the following: everything offends someone and most everyone is offended by something. Why, I’m offended by the fact that cultural terrorists are denuding our cultural landscape of the things closest to the American heart. The fact is that what’s offensive is very subjective. This explains why our preoccupation with avoiding giving offense has degenerated into a never-ending battle that inures us to untruth, injustice and the un-American way.
Could you imagine the Islamic world shedding its traditions under the pretext of tolerance and sensitivity? Are we, for some inexplicable reason, to be the only nation that has no right to its culture? A.D. and B.C. have been in use for fifteen-hundred years. For some left-wing academics to come along and presume that they have a right to remake this and whatever else doesn’t suit their transitory fancies is outrageous. It’s almost as outrageous as the fact that most of us stand idly by and do nothing to resist their machinations. It is not only our right but our duty to protect the great and good that dozens of generations of our ancestors have bequeathed to us. And we would do well to remember that civilizations rise and fall; they are born, mature, age and die. If we want to preserve ours, we had better stand and be counted and tend to her cultural health. If we will not, perhaps it really is our time to walk quietly into the night. And if so, our epitaph just may read: Oh, principled were we, we wouldn’t bend, we were sensitive till the end.
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...
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