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and suspect it's intentional- the agenda being to eliminate all Christian references from our daily lives.

No, it's done so that scholars and researchers can use a common frame of reference in research. Different religions (cultures) have different calenders. In the Muslim and Jewish calenders it's not 2004, they measure from different starting dates. So it makes a lot more sense to have a common neutral frame of reference that everyone can use regardless of their religion.

No, it's done so that scholars and researchers can use a common frame of reference in research. Different religions (cultures) have different calenders. In the Muslim and Jewish calenders it's not 2004, they measure from different starting dates. So it makes a lot more sense to have a common neutral frame of reference that everyone can use regardless of their religion.

...which just happens to have the same starting point as AD/BC.

IF that were the real reason, then a 'neutral', but equally earth shattering, starting point would have been picked...say, August 6, 1945.

So we have the Paleozoic Era, the Meozoic Era, the Cambrian Era, amongst others which I suppose are now rolled up into 'BCE' . And to that we add the 'Common Era'. I don't who came up with that 'Common Era' but I sure don't think I'd care to party with them. A house plant probably has more personality.

It still strikes me as a forced and phony contrivance in order to consciously break with tradition. Chinese and Jewish calendars are still abandoned in favor of this system so nothing's changed. BC/AD had become a defacto standard such that people don't give it a second thought.
It's no more different name for the same thing. What establishes the transition point? What differntiates BCE from CE then?

It's as hollow as people using the term 'the n-word' rather than the word itself. It's riduculous.

No, this is the work of paranoid secularists and perhaps England is a bit 'ahead' of the US in that department. Personally I don't really care what the academics choose to use. I'm just fed up with hypersensitive political correctness and the busy-bodies who go out of their way to find discrimination, racism, injustice where there really none exists, while ignoring the blantant examples of it in front of their very noses.