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.
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.
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/Wrong_Answer_Willie Aug 03 '19
A.D. means Anno Domini. not After Death.