Common Era

During one of my classes last week, we discussed methods of time keeping and counting years, including our Christian-based system, but also the Muslim, Jewish, Chinese, and Buddhist calendars. At some point, one of my classmates declare that she refused to use BC and AD, but chose to use BCE and CE; Before Common Era and Common Era (or Current Era). She refused to use the "Christian system" because she "didn't believe in it" and because she thought it "arrogant" to impose your religion on the world like that. Our lecturer kindly argued that he thought that that was arrogant, as the whole CE system still uses the Christian time reckoning, it just removed the religious element. Before this could turn into a real (and probably painful) discussion we moved off to something else, but it kept me thinking.
Somehow a conversation I had today turned to the subject, and I found out that Jews have been using the Common Era annotation for longer, because they do not like referencing to Christ. Fair enough. But then I was reading a paper (actually, I'm in the middle of reading it, as I stopped to type this), and they mentioned the Greeks doing something in 500 BCE, and that just somehow went the wrong way. I mean, the Greeks have absolutely nothing to do with the Christian faith, but it just feels so contrived to put it like that. So look-at-us-going-out-of-our-way-to-look-secular-and-scientific-and-disinterested.
So I started looking for more information, and the Wikipedia page as usual came in handy. Apparently, I'm very late coming to this, because it's already standard practise in many American textbooks, and the Brits are going that way as well. Soon, nobody will use BC and AD anymore (except for Christians, of course, who are very offended by all this), and we'll all happily use BCE and CE.

So what's next?
Do these people realise that our days of the week are named after a mixture of Germanic and Roman gods? I mean, Thursday is named after Thor! And Wednesday is derived from Wodan, or even Mercurius if you're living in a Romance language country Off with their heads! We don't believe in Thor or Mercury anymore! Come to think of that, most of our planets are named after Roman gods as well! Do we believe in them? No way! Bye bye Mars and Venus, from now on it'll be Manplanet and Womanplanet. But it gets worse; the whole continent of Europe is called after someone from Greek mythology! Quick, change the name, before everybody thinks we still believe in it!
But it doesn't stop there. It's not only names, before you know it, you won't be able to say "the powers that be" or "the writing's on the wall" or proverbs such as "you reap what you sow" and "the blind leading the blind", because all of these are from the Bible, and you don't believe in that, do you? Will we still be able to say "We're not in Kansas anymore" even though we don't believe in The Wizard of Oz? Will in that near future anyone be able to remark "Curiouser and curiouser" without being branded as an "Alice-believer"?

I think I've made my point clear. Everything, or almost everything, we say has some background, some history, some connotation. If you look at the English language, many words are derived from Shakespeare and other literary giants, but many also come from the Bible. If you don't belief in the Christian religion anymore, does that mean you can't use words related to it? I think that's nonsense. Any religious connotation it may once have had has disappeared for most of us, until you put the spotlight on it, like these people do.
Moreover, if you're going to abolish a system, don't replace it with exactly the same thing only with a different name tag. If they'd generated a new calendar, a new way of counting the years, and argued that we're now living in year 4,548,489,932 or something, I'd be happy to change to their system (also, you'd get rid of the whole Before Something and After Something debate). But this way, nahhh. It's too contrived, it's too look-at-us-being-clever-and-secular, and there's no point. You either change it all (and the list I mentioned with all the days and planets etc is veeeeeery extensive) or you keep things as they are. You wouldn't go knocking down the Parthenon just because we don't believe in those Greek gods anymore, would you? Then don't do it to words. They're just words, after all.