I don’t give a crap why the BBC is doing it, I’m explaining why BCE and CE have existed for 400 years, most of which were before there ever was a BBC. The fact remains that it’s more culturally neutral and a smarter way to discuss the time frame of events in a culture that didn’t even know who Christ was when the events occurred. Really you accidentally provide exactly the reason for it, AD is “year of our Lord”, which wasn’t necessarily their Lord. And it’s the common era because the archeologists, which are the people that do all this discussing, decided it was the common era.
Actually the point from which we date our Calendar is the province of everyone—not just an elite group of archeologists—no matter how many random letters they put after their names.
There’s no reason that the field of archeology should determine what we call the calendar—since EVERYONE relies on the calendar for every date and time we set.
Just as the spelling and definitions of the original Oxford dictionary were intended to be as democratic as possible—reflecting actual spelling and usage, and not what some elite commission says SHOULD be the spelling and usage (e.g. as in French and German...) so too the archeologists and others academics blinded by Science... are wildly outnumbered by those of us that prefer to be honest with our calender—dated from a rough estimate of the birth of Christ—and choose to use BC and AD.
This is the Calendar of the Christian world...and those who don’t like it, should use some other calendar and not misname ours!
Balderdash.
Anno Domini means year of Our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, are you asserting that Dionysius wasn’t a Christian?
He changed it because he was tired of using the dates from Diocletian.
anther term for PC anti-Christian balderdash. Let me know when you start using different names for the weekdays since they pay homage to Norse gods. We wouldn't want to OFFEND anyone, dontcha know.