The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

Sorry I’ve had my head under a rock or something, but I just discovered the abbreviation B.C.E., used in connection with a date: 2500 B.C.E. I couldn’t figure out what it meant, so I Googled it and found it stands for “Before Common Era,” and is used by people who would rather not bring religion (i.e., Christ) into the equation. Talk about hiding your head under a rock. So then I find out they don’t like A.D., either, so they’ve substituted C.E. The reference on Google says those definitions will probably gradually become the common way of expressing those two periods. What?

Uhmmm… pardon me, but does that make any sense to you at all? I mean the two periods are pretty obviously based on the (representative) date Jesus was born. Like “Before Christ,” and “Anno Domini” (year of our Lord.) But I don’t like the thought of making some religious figure the center of my calendar, so I’m going to put my hands over my ears and go “Yayayayayayayayayayayaya” until it goes away. Obviously, the way to avoid using BC and AD is to use some calendar other than the Gregorian. Like the Julian, for example.  Oops. That’s based on the same focal date: the birth of Christ.

Maybe the Babylonian Calendar? Well, it seems that one doesn’t have any starting point. And a calendar kind of needs a starting point, except no one really knows with any degree of accuracy, when the world started, so we can’t really start there. The Jewish calendar won’t work, because it’s religious, too, but at least it has a starting point — the result of adding all the ages of people in the bible back to creation — although everyone, even the Jews, admit that’s a figure you can’t actually hang your hat on. The thing is, since we can’t really pinpoint the beginning of the world, a really simple workaround is to pick a date, like Jesus’ birthday, and count days before it as minus, and days after it as plus. That way you don’t have to know the world’s precise starting point, and any date you happen to find by carbon dating or any other method, fits easily into your calendar. Wow. Me, Pope Gregory, genius!

But I digress. Okay, we can’t find a calendar that really works without bringing some kind of religious belief into it. Damn. Wait! Here’s a solution! Let’s just take out the word “Christ,” substitute something else, like “common,” and that will take care of it. Bam! Christ goes away. Like… ummm… I don’t like the sun, because it has a lot of religious connotations, like from the Egyptians and so forth. So I’m going to make it go away by renaming it, ummm, Herbie. Yeah. That’ll do it.

Watch it. There are some really stupid people out there.