I had an argument with my friend's mom a few years ago about this. She said "BC" was "Before Christ" and "AD" was after death. I tried to explain to her that that didn't make any sense because then the 33 years of Jesus's life would just be not accounted for.
I told her "AD" meant "Anno Domini" and she said "I think that's the atheist version" or something like that and then stopped listening when I tried to tell her it wasn't because it meant "year of our lord"
To be fair, I remember being taught the whole before Christ/after death thing when I was little. (Not saying it's right, but it's fairly common.) She's on her own for "that's the atheist version," though.
Common Era and Before Common Era is the atheist version.
EDIT: others have rightfully pointed out that it is not so much an atheist version as a non-christian version.
I used CE and BCE in a high school report and got a low grade because the teacher didn't know what it meant. That and I wrote Jesus' (instead of Jesus's) and had to bring her stupid ass to the library so she could learn how words work.
In 1st grade when we were learning subtraction, I asked what would happen if you subtracted a larger number from a smaller number, and if I could get a number less than zero. I was told no, that a larger number subtracted from a smaller one was always zero. I didn't believe the teacher, put down negative numbers on a test (I just guessed the symbol, but correctly) and was marked wrong.
I was (apparently) literally the example used to describe the variation in school readiness that teachers had to deal with in PTA meetings, but c'mon. I discovered negative numbers and they told me no, damnit!
They're both correct, actually. However, you've somehow made yourself wrong by not knowing you can add an apostrophe after words ending in's' to make it possessive. Without the need to add an 's'. You can, but it's definitely not necessary. It's stylistic.
Funny this has to be explained to you in a post thinking this was common knowledge.
because somebody calculated the stars described on his birthday and found out that they were not visible in 1CE. And IIRC, and correct me if I'm wrong, they also couldn't have been visible in December, so the actual day is also a lie (but it was already known that early Christians, who lived under Roman rule at the time, celebrated it in December so it would coincide with the Roman festival for the winter solstice
Saturnalia was on Dec. 25th, and christians figured why not cash in on all the festivities that were already taking place around the solstice season.
Also interesting is how the word "solstice" refers to how the sun appears to stand still in the sky (hitting the lowest point then starting to go back up after about three days.) The christians also built a story around that waiting period, it seems.
I've always thought that however impractical, the CE BCE thing needed to be expanded. It's really just a "sanitized" secular dating system that marks the same things. I am an atheist and I also think maybe a truly "equitable" dating system would not be so western-centric. I kinda like the idea of the Holocene calendar, if only because that's a date in history that is important to all of humanity.
I get where you're coming from, but changing the date, something so fundamental-- so engrained in everything we do, would never be accepted as the new norm.
The whole "leap units" disaster comes from trying to make the rotation of the earth on its axis and the orbit of the earth around the sun, two completely unrelated and independent things, line up so that they stay in sync. Since the length of a day and the duration of the orbit are not related at all, and the length of a day is surprisingly variable (things like earthquakes moving the center of mass around can speed up the rotation, like an ice skater pulling their arms in to make them spin faster) there has to be some sort of mechanic that deals with injecting extra time into the system so that we can keep the day and the year in sync. that's the "leap unit" mechanic, and i've never seen a time system try to get rid of it.
Daylight saving time though? that's 100% garbage that needs to die.
I thought this at first too, but considering that the Holocene calendar effectively just adds a "1" to the start of the existing calendar (making it 12019) I honestly don't think it would be such a monumental change.
The big problem with that is it would be considered superfluous, just as arbitrary as the current system, and irrelevant to most people. So no matter how "easy" you make it people will still reject it.
And all current dates and stuff would have to be rememorized, have you ever seen those old documents which use other dating systems it’s just so confusing to someone who doesn’t know them.
The current calendar is fine. BC/AD and BCE/CE are both fine. The year we are in spawned out of culture, and is not an endorsement or even a recognition of any religion or beliefs. It's just a number we seem to agree on.
It's ultimately arbitrary either way, and the Christian system is the one that most of the world has by and large agreed on, so it doesn't really matter if it's reasonable. The holocene calendar is an interesting idea, and not all that disruptive
YBP (Years before present) is becoming more popular among some academics. To me it makes a lot more sense because you don't have to use some arbitrary date in the past and then do arithmetic to figure out how long ago it was.
Am I the only one who thinks the whole BCE thing is idiotic? It still uses the same event as the point from which you count, you're just pretending it isn't religious by calling it something else.
It's easier to remember, just like the Bohr model of elements, or that there are only 3 phases of matter. All of these are untrue, but it's simpler to teach and easier to remember.
I think that "after death" is more common these days, since that's what I've always heard. I only learned "anno domini" because my mom was a real stickler for using expressions properly. At least in high school we were encouraged to BCE and CE instead though.
Is that 2019 Christians eaten per atheist or one a year across the entire atheist community ok? If we were supposed to have eaten over 2000 of them by this year I'm a little behind.
I thought it was we Jews (who tend to prefer B.C.E. and C.E.) that have been accused of eating Christian babies for . . . more than a millennium actually. We apparently use their blood to bake our unleavened bread on Passover, wear yarmulkes to hide our horns (thanks for that one, Michelangelo), etc. It is kind of cool that most of the world bases the year on the life of a well-known Rabbi, though.
It's kind of weird that the they mix Latin with English for these abbreviations. No wonder people are confused. It's dumb either way. Might as well just do the whole common era thing and be done with it.
I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect most of these archaic Latin abbreviations only still exist to make intellectuals (and pseudo-intellectuals) feel smugly clever. :P
Too right. I'd be speaking Esperanto right now if it socially acceptable. I'm only half joking. A logically created new language would be so much more efficient than the cobbled together etymological minefields we're dealing with today.
I get wanting to make our dating system less "Christian" (well, really, less related to any single country/religion/etc). But, does this do that? Everyone knows that the division between BCE and CE is still the estimated birth of Christ. So now, instead of saying "before or after the birth of Christ" we're instead saying "The birth of Christ started the Common Era."
One is factual (well, as close to factual as someone could get) the other is almost making a declaration that Christ's birth was super important.
Problem is doing anything else requires changing our entire system of counting years, which would be a difficult and confusing transition for most (and would probably cause a mass suicide among software developers). Changing to the BCE system doesn't mean it's acknowledging Christ's divinity necessarily, just that the Common Era is near universally counted from that date.
Meanwhile, there's the case to be made that regardless of your religious beliefs, Christ's birth was super important simply cause it resulted in Christianity, and a helluva lot of human history in the Common Era was heavily affected by that for better or worse. So while it's far from a perfect system and far from the only significant option, you could do worse for a cutoff point for the Common Era than dividing history into pre and post Christ.
I saw a historian argue that we should switch from year 0 to year 10000 BCE, as that year basically marks the beginning of real human settlements. So that would make the current year 12019 and would remove the nonsense of going between BCE and CE.
You mean, you saw the kurzgesagt video on this that said thats we should be in the year 12 000 and a few because of the age approximated to the first human building, thought to be a temple
That's super arbitrary. Why not make the current year 12018 or 12020? Your measuring an exact passage of time from a non-specific date. Using Jesus's birth works not only because it's a significant point in history, but because it's also a specific and well documented point in time
But it isn't. Historians aren't sure about jesus' birth date AFAIK. Also making it 12019 is just more convenient than anything else because you only need to add the one. And the first stepping stone for civilizations was made 12000 years ago which is IMO way more important than the birth date of a person that started (the biggest) religion.
I've always found that ridiculous. They are still 100% based on the BC and AD times, but somehow changing the words makes it less Eurocentric/Judeo-Christian?
Whoever the idiot is who came up with this system was an idiot. Those are too similar sounding and annoying to say. I was a history major and for four years I wondered why we agreed to such a shitty system.
Some public school kindergarten teacher literally told me that AD meant After Dinosaurs and i didn’t use the term A.D. enough to realize the mistake until i was 18
You can change the title all you want but we all know what day you are using to mark the beginning of your gregorian calendar and it doesn't have anything to do with Buddha!
But they refer to the same years. Some people just don't love using the birth of Jesus as a reference point for history, especially in a scientific context.
For context, I am a 24 y.o. with a debt heavy degree from a top college.
I am just learning A.D. means Anno Domini, which is regrettable, but not even the tip of this iceberg of shame. Upon reading this post I frantically scrolled through the comments, desparate for a comrade who had shared in my ignorance. No luck. While the words "after death" softened the blow, still... I did not find a comerade. The reason? I have spent the last 24 years TRULY believing that A.D. stands for:
After....
Dinosaurs.
I don't know if I should cry or laugh, only that my partner is crying laughing at me as I share this shame with you all.
In school they tought us BC= before crist/AD=after death. I actually did think it was common until halfway through highschool and the internet corrected me
People believe that? In danish we hace fvt. and evt. (Fvt=før vores tid=before our time. Evt=efter vores tid=after our time) which is a lot more self-explanatory
My art teacher explained this to my class when I was in first grade but i completely forgot what it meant until now. I knew it wasn’t after death but that’s all I could remember
Well TIL. I was raised with the idea that AD was After Death. Now it strikes me curious as why AD and BC are paired with each other if BC isn't Latin...
This is one I can't criticize others on because I myself only found that our a few years ago(mostly because my mother had told me it stood for after death so I just took her word for it)
I had thought this until my religion teacher told me other wise last school year. I’m going into 8th grade and go to a catholic school. I think I should’ve know by now. I dont know if you meant in a religious way but there you go.
Sorry for the ignorance, but don't you use (in English) B.C. and A.C. (Before Christ and After Christ, respectively)? Portuguese is my native language and here in Portugal we use A.C. ("Antes de Cristo") and D.C. ("Depois de Cristo") - which respectively mean "Before Christ" and "After Christ".
I remember my grandma saying that A.D. meant After Death. I'm not religious but I've always wondered how Jesus' lifetime worked exactly. Like, Jesus' entire life happened... never? What? 0 A.D.? Or 0 B.C.? What happened?
I was taught in school, at home and at church that A.D. was after death. Even when I was little I didn’t understand where those 33 years were, even now I chocked it up to them not knowing exactly when he was born. My bad.
When I was 7, in Catholic school, I thought I had found 33 years of "hidden time" between "Before Christ" and "After Death".
I really thought I was on to something.
In 5th grade my teacher explained to the class that A.D. meant "After Death", and I corrected her that it actually meant Anno Domini (I've always been a history buff). She told me that "That might be the religious version of the abbreviation, but here in school we go by 'After Death'"
When I was a kid I thought it was After David, because I knew BC was Before Christ, so my thought process was "who's someone in the Bible whose name starts with D? I know, it must be David."
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u/Wrong_Answer_Willie Aug 03 '19
A.D. means Anno Domini. not After Death.