The whole "common era" (BCE-CE) has to be the stupidest thing ever and I say that as a Christian who thinks we should indeed have a secular calendar.
"Oh no we can't use "Before Christ" and "After Christ", that's so Eurocentric. We'll change it to something else, like "common era", that's more neutral."
"Oh okay, and what's gonna be year 0 then?"
"Oh, the year of the birth of Christ of course"
As far as I'm concerned we live in the year 62 A.G. of the Space Age (After Gagarin), like in a proper sci-fi novel.
HUMANITY DID NOT BEGIN 10.000 YEARS AGO NEITHER DID THE FIRST HUMAN STRUCTURES, THAT'S AN ARBITRARY VAGUE YEAR PULLED OUT OF NOWHERE, AND IT STILL FRAMES IT AROUND THE BIRTH OF CHRIST, THAT CALENDAR IS A STUPID MEME FROM KUZERGARST OR WHATEVER THAT YOUTUBE CHANNEL IS SPELLED I'M TIRED OF SEEING IT IN THE NOTES IT'S SO FHAHAHAHAAHAHA BATMAN I'M GOING TO DESTROY GOTHAM CITY
having to change all your dates fucking sucks and is almost completely infeasible at this point, and BCE/CE is as good an attempt at secularization as you're gonna get. idk what the issue is here
i mean i think this is one of the cases where 'as good an attempt as you're gonna get' is significantly worse than nothing. a thin coat of neutrality over something that is fundamentally not neutral is imo much worse than a plain admission that we're stuck with this date system & of the history behind it. like e.g. 'english as lingua franca' is also something that the world is going to be stuck with for the forseeable future because of inertia but saying "we're going to be calling it The International Language instead of english from now on" would make things much worse rather than better
Yeah idk - as a Jew who's not a huge fan of the whole "Christianity" deal in general for a number of reasons, I'd rather have the BCE/CE stuff - it takes some small thing away from the utter normalization of Christianity where I live and much of the world.
Like, even the Christians aren't super clear on when they actually think the dude was born, and we super don't care when he was born. So it basically becomes "this is the point that a bunch of assholes decided to start counting, and now we're stuck with it."
So year 0 isn't "the year Christ was born" it's "the year they started counting at some point, which they thought was when Christ was born but are almost certainly wrong about, if he even existed IRL"
And calling it BCE/CE, for me, puts the lie to the whole "it's about JESUS" thing and says no, it is not in fact about Jesus it is in fact about the normalized Christian-centrism of much of the world and how that governs so much of what y'all call "secular" which is, at best, culturally Christian (if not outright religiously Christian).
Anyway it's 5783, kiss my ass.
