Interesting article about Conservapedia

"Andy Schlafly was appalled. He was teaching a history class to home-schooled teens and one student had just turned in an assignment that dated events as "BCE," before the common era - rather than "B.C." or before Christ.


"Where did that come from?" he demanded.


Her answer was "Wikipedia."


Schlafly knew he had to act. In his mind, the popular online encyclopedia - written and edited by self-appointed experts worldwide - was riddled with liberal bias.......

http://thegallopingbeaver.blogspot.com/2007/06/conservapedia-makes-splash-in-la.html

just found out how im going to refer to a time frame that was before 1 ad.

To replace A.D.

If one is not Christian, the terms are meaningless.

BC stands for "Before Christ." Big deal, right? Except Christ was not Jesus' last name. Christ is Greek for "anointed one" - the Hebrew term is "messiah." Since most of the world doesn't really believe Jesus was the Messiah...

Also, AD does not mean "After Death" it is from the Latin "Anno Domini" which means "year of our Lord." Again, if you are not Christian, Jesus is not your Lord.

So, these terms are not about a Liberal bias, it is simply acknowledging a fact. Of course, as another post has already indicated - perhaps recognition of facts and inclusiveness are Liberal ideas while certainty not supported by research, exclusiveness and unwillingness to change are Conservative ones.

getting these people to "simply acknowledging a fact" is not so simple, when they have a different definition of the word "fact."

Phyllis Schlafly (born August 15, 1924, in St. Louis, Missouri)<1> is an American conservative political activist known for her best-selling 1964 book A Choice, Not An Echo, and her opposition to feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Schlafly co-authroed several books on national defense, and was highly critical of arms-control agreements with the former Soviet Union.<2> In 1961 she wrote that arms control "will not stop Red aggression any more than disarming our local police will stop murder, theft, and rape."<3>

A widely-published author and commentator, Schlafly also maintains an active presence on the lecture circuit. In 1972, she founded the Eagle Forum, and was the founder and president of a sister organization known as the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, which also operates in the Eagle Forum's St. Louis office. As of 2007, she is still the president of both organizations. Since 1967, she has published her own political newsletter, the Phyllis Schlafly Report.

She was married to attorney John Fred Schlafly, Jr., (1909–1993) for forty-four years. They had six children: John, Bruce, Roger, Liza, Andrew, and Anne.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Schlafly

I have to admit I couldn't talk myself into reading the whole article. What a loser.

And scholars have been using the term for decades as more inclusive language, especially when communicating with scholars of other countries that aren't predominantly Christian.

Just because everyone uses the same year number doesn't mean that they think it's historically significant.

Using "Common Era" is sort of a compromise.

What those people believe to be true is jaw-dropping. For example, that the 19th Amendment (recognizing women's right to vote) was a result of "activist judges".

Can you believe that? My eyes rolled back so far in my head when I read that that I could see my sinuses!



Having said that, I prefer "BC" and "AD" myself. We have no "common era", it's just a bunch of feel-good crap. The Gregorian calender has been highly refined from that assumed year of Jesus' birth, we have the ability to convert Gregorian dates into any and all other calender system known to man, and it's a date far enough back to be neutral to all current nations.

If it's the exact same reference year with a new name, then leave it alone. It's not like both Jesus and Muhammad were born that year and we're trying to be accomodating.

Else, pick a known year when something really big happened and start counting from there. Like, say, 1945 and the first atomic bomb, or 1903 and powered flight, or 1957 and the first satellite, or 1969 and the first moon landing.