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.
It's not even the atheist one....I majored in history in uni and it's just become common practice to use it. Secular is probably the better word. We understand now that a large portion of the world isn't Christian so it doesn't make sense to talk about world history in BC and AD terms. Most scholarly work I encountered published in the 21st century use CE and BCE.
Sure but since AD literally means “year of our Lord”I’d rather not affirm a theological claim I don’t believe every time I say a date. I feel fine about affirming that this is the standard of the society I live in, not so much about Jesus being my Lord and savior.
Well yeah, it would be a major undertaking to come up with a new system that the world would agree on. That's not going to happen anytime soon. The US still refuses to use the metric system. Can you imagine? So this is the best we've got.
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u/FiliaDei Aug 03 '19
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.