On Sunday 24 November 2002 04:00 am, Eclecticology wrote:
I prefer BC because it's shorter than BCE.
As much as I know the origins of "BC" and its relationship to the life
of Jesus, my atheistic sensitivities are not offended by its use. "BCE"
has always struck me as affectatiously hyper-correct.
I agree. I'm also an atheist (or at least a highly skeptical agnostic) and am
more offended by efforts to do away for BC than with the fact that BC stands
for "Before Christ". The whole effort is stupid and silly IMO - it is like
trying to reform a criminal by only changing their name. Rubbish.
What is really needed is a better system that has some meaningful starting
point such as the establishment of the first human agricultural society. But
since we can't possibly pin down an exact year for such a thing I don't think
it is at all possible (and if it were there would invariably be later
research that finds an even earlier society). So that leaves us with the
Christan calendar. IMO pretending it isn't is just pure delusion (that
doesn't mean we should use AD - AD is overtly POV and not needed to
distinguish from BC dates).
Nevertheless, if the author of an article wants to use
"BCE" or "CE" in
his own article, I would be inclined to treat it as an option in the
same way that we deal with American/British spellings. Where a person
does use "AD", however, I would treat it as wrong to put it after the
year number.
I haven't seen many cases of the use of BCE or CE in Wikipedia. BC is still
comfortably the dominant usage and since there aren't any pressing POV issues
with it we should stay with it.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
payment for this post
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hatchett