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
|From: Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com |Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 12:09:23 -0800 | |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). |
After all, Jesus wasn't even a European (or a Christian), was he?
A less controversial date, not that it will ever happen, would be the birth of Alexander, the first person to conceive of the world and humankind as a joint enterprise, and as good a marker as any of the actual point at which universal history begins, uninterrupted to this day. That would make this the year 2358 AA.
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88
I mean, of course, that I'm shovelling my face with roasted cashews as I type ;-)
But seriously, I'd like to propose a new "What Wikipedia is not" item:
* a compendium of *all* human knowledge, no matter how trivial
this means we don't have the nine million digits of pi; or the Helsinki telephone book, or my shopping list from last week.
(some of the current items on that list are specific cases of this proposed item; but reorganizing might be a bad idea since people often refer to points on that page by their number)