Submitted by AugustWolf22 t3_zmnnd5 in history
Trovadordelrei t1_j0e9sn0 wrote
Reply to comment by indecisive_maybe in The Garamantes: Rome's neighbours in the Sahara. by AugustWolf22
Not at all. I'm an atheist, but saying that CE is "more correct" is silly.
It tries to cut ties with religious connotations but it still has Jesus's alleged birth as basis, so....
Not to mention that even the days of the week in most European languages (English included) have religious-related names (though not Christian). I'm not seeing anyone arguing that we should change the name of the 5th (or 4th, depending on the convention used) day of the week (thursday) just because Thor is no longer worshipped.
SolomonBlack t1_j0egwzi wrote
Reason based calendars! Up with Thermidor! Vive le Revolution!
At any rate yeah this supposed ‘common era’ is even less correct because it directly applies Eurocentrism to everyone with something that isn’t the least bit held in common around the world.
If using BC/AD is that much of an issue clearly we need to adopt a new calendar from zero, a universal century or some such.
gc3 t1_j0f6meh wrote
OK lets go to Unix time, the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970!
masshiker t1_j0fnqoi wrote
Nobody actually knows when Jesus was born.it's just guess at this point.
SolomonBlack t1_j0fypcl wrote
Nobody knows but it is not a guess. That would imply you could lob out almost any answer which would be very lazy (and indeed unscientific) scholarship.
Like we have references in multiple Gospels to him being born in the reign of Herod the Great so 1 AD is rather probably off because the man was already dead then. Though there is some dispute about when Herod died too. Ancient dates are hard and every nice pretty date you see comes from sorting out and connecting X year of so-n-so's reign or who was consul. And taking on faith your source remembered it right.
Meanwhile even discounting mentions of his birth Pontius Pilate was only governor of Judea for a limited period so one can work backwards from there as to what might be an appropriate age.
So Anno Domini is most likely late by a few years but probably still within a decade of whatever the real number is, which maybe isn't bad for work done in 525 on such a low key historical figure.
Unnamed_Bystander t1_j0fjyc9 wrote
I think in this context "more correct" can be taken to mean, "more in keeping with currently accepted practice." It's a style thing, whether or not it really makes any difference or sense. In official capacities, most present historians use BCE/CE.
As to whether we should, that's another question entirely. If anything, I'd say it makes more sense to call the breaking point around the time of the first evident monumental architecture circa 10,000-12,000 years ago if we really cared about secularizing the dating system, but that's expecting a lot of change. I can see the impetus to do so, given the ever diminishing role of Christianity in a global and generally less religious society, as well as a desire to re-frame history away from Eurocentric terms, but things like a dating system have tremendous cultural inertia to overcome, so we end up with half measures that satisfy nobody, but we use them anyway because that's the style.
Alluvium t1_j0fooi0 wrote
It’s less Jesus and more the fact that during the start of the common era there was unifying religious events.
It also occurs as the romans establish a republic and kick off “modern government” in Europe. At the same time as others.
CE is less religion and more a western concept avoiding its primary importance to the religious folk - since fairytales don’t work well in history.
Wonckay t1_j0gchft wrote
CE is literally just AD with a different name. It definitely has nothing to do with the establishment of the Roman republic which collapsed before CE even started. These backwards rationalizations trying to ignore the actual origin of CE place unmerited importance on the period.
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