English: Language of the Gods

Should we, as atheists, be saying BC and AD?

Yes by God!

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• atheism
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• BC
• AD
• BCE
• CE
• Common Era
• Before the Common Era
• Anno Domini
• religious language
• taboo
• juggernaut
• Thursday
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[iMaDeMoN2012]

Well BCE and CE are now standard in all American schools. It's not a big deal. Students that have attended grade school since the new millenium will naturally be familiar with the terms Common Era. I'm confident the Catholic church alone will be suffice preserve the use of Anno Domini and Before Christ.

[MartinJWillett]

@iMaDeMoN2012 The majority of the western world not brought up in a system of brainwashing such as the Catholic Church or American public school system just use BC and AD without a thought as to what the letters stand for. They are as devoid of great significance as AM and PM, i.e and e.g.

[iMaDeMoN2012]

@MartinJWillett I'm not really concerned with preserving historical usage, I'm more interested in function. The days of the calendar are track our journey around the sun relative to earth rotations. Hours track the rotation of a particular point on the earth relative to the sun. Here hours are not like days, days keep time, hours keep position. To track time we should use a UT everywhere and have a non-time related terminology to indicate relative position like morning, noon, night.

[MartinJWillett]

@iMaDeMoN2012 Preserving historical usages allows us to understand the past. Changing the language, spelling and usage every five years or so to mark a new arsey uppity generation coming along vying for power and status is an incredibly bad idea which will rapidly divorce us from our culture and roots. The young need to be savagely slapped down to stop them destroying their own heritage before they get to inherit it.

[Hereticalable]

Part of me thinks the current convention is fine as a point of historical fiction...a myth...a legend if you will. Another part of me thinks we should start the calender from a more provable event: the first bomb at Hiroshima, the Battle of Tours or Vienna, the invention of anti-biotics. The problem is which event do we choose as the new benchmark which will be acceptable to most nations so we're not changing it again in the future?

[MartinJWillett]

@Hereticalable There is no obvious date everybody will be happy with so just go with tradition and the line of least resistance. Most books with dates in them are using the current BC AD convention, anybody reading anything else already knows they are into something foreign or ancient or both.

[Slacktoo]

@StopSpamming1 Fool

[A1R5N1P3R]

Only Wizards and Chimney Sweeps speak english, I speak American!

[mydogbanjo]

You are quite correct my friend. I like to worship Odin on the Sabbath, though, with my voodoo beads..... unless it's the thirteenth in which case I go to the pub and drink to Jupiter and Mars.....the planets not the gods. I've got it all written down somewhere so it's quite likely to catch on when I've taken the last comet hidden spaceship to Nibiru....The end is coming!!! Right after these brief words from our sponsors... I'm rambling......appologies.... Beam me up Scotty...Scotty?.....Jebus?