Why one wonders, does the Common Era just happen to start at the same time as Anno Domini? What is this “common era” of which they speak?
The BBC has been accused of ‘absurd political correctness’ after dropping the terms BC and AD in case they offend non-Christians. The Corporation has replaced the familiar Anno Domini (the year of Our Lord) and Before Christ with the obscure terms Common Era and Before Common Era.
I find it hard to get too worked up about this sort of thing. It’s not new for the enemies of Christianity and it won’t last. Common Era and Before Common Era have been bubbling around the more absurd peripheries for a while, but they are going to last in the mainstream about as long as Thermidor and Fructidor did. And even if I wasn’t a Christian, I would think it was the height of lame faddery to ditch a tradition of more than one thousand years for no valid reason.