Submitted by Irfan Khawaja, Dec 19, 2007 13:23

Yes, "BC" refers to "before Christ," but "BCE" refers to "before the common era," and the reviewer used the latter. When you stop to consider that Christ himself was somehow born before Christ (in 4 BC), you begin to see why some of us tune out when we hear the very name "Christ." As for the "silliness of forced revisionism," you might consider that it was Pope Gregory XIII who did the main revising that led to our current calendar (via revisions of the Julian calendar before Gregory and a series of revisions to the Gregorian calendar after him). "BCE" is a fairly minor concession to the not-very-revolutionary idea that not everyone thinks of history in terms of the birth of Jesus Christ, and not everyone should have to.

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