Personally, people who try to enforce the use of BCE and CE over BC/AD irritated me well before I ever knew who Jesus was.
Imagine a committee deciding that AM and PM should now be called Before Noon and After Noon, without changing anything about the timekeeping system itself. Most people would ignore the shift entirely, and when forced to use it by academic or publishing standards, they would mentally translate it back to the familiar system anyway.
Declaring “this is now the way” does not carry real authority. It is simply pedantry from people who have authority in narrow arenas. If a system genuinely does not meet the need, propose a new one and name it whatever you like. But if the system is functional, relabeling it and calling it a new standard is only cosmetic, and at worst it is plagiarism of the original system.
And if the goal is to avoid religious references entirely, that is a losing battle. You would have to rename six months of the year, five to seven days of the week depending on the language, and every classical planet in the solar system.
Personally, people who try to enforce the use of BCE and CE over BC/AD irritated me well before I ever knew who Jesus was.
Imagine a committee deciding that AM and PM should now be called Before Noon and After Noon, without changing anything about the timekeeping system itself. Most people would ignore the shift entirely, and when forced to use it by academic or publishing standards, they would mentally translate it back to the familiar system anyway.
Declaring “this is now the way” does not carry real authority. It is simply pedantry from people who have authority in narrow arenas. If a system genuinely does not meet the need, propose a new one and name it whatever you like. But if the system is functional, relabeling it and calling it a new standard is only cosmetic, and at worst it is plagiarism of the original system.
And if the goal is to avoid religious references entirely, that is a losing battle. You would have to rename six months of the year, five to seven days of the week depending on the language, and every classical planet in the solar system.