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I want to convert all the religious people to atheism. That is impossible. I want to create a world government. That is impossible. So while I am about it why not aim for something else a bit on the large side, a new year zero.
No doubt you are all heartily sick of being told that the Third Millennium of the Common Era doesn't actually start until 1 January 2001, because there was no year zero. Well I have told you again. If there was a year zero year 100 is 100 years after year 0, not 99 years after year 1.
To declare the current year to be year zero is too millennial, if that is not too much of a mixed metaphor. Now is always the first day of the rest of your life. (Yeah, yeah, I am actually writing the first draft of this page on my 37th birthday.) But to say that this year is the start of a new era is really asking everybody to invest it with too much significance. When the catholic church/Roman Empire declared year 1 AD they did not declare the current year, it was a year in the past. The year when everything new began. It was the year they thought that their messiah was born. It was almost certainly not right. I don't know if there really was a historical Jesus, but I am very confident that he was not born in 1 AD and certainly not on 25 December. For one thing he is so obviously a Leo...
Do we need a new calendar and a new year zero? That is not the issue I am addressing, let us assume that we have decided to have a year zero, when should it be?
I suggest we date the calendar from the moment that the planet Earth first hosted a self aware species.
This can be quite accurately dated. Homo sapiens first entered into the stage of self awareness in the aftermath of the publication of the greatest work ever published in this or any language. In the year we know as 1859 our species first became aware of the central truth of its own existence.
The book in question was written by an independently wealthy English scientist by the name of Charles Darwin. |
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From the moment that book was published atheism went from being the philosophy of of the libertine, the outcast and the imbecile to become the natural philosophy of all scientists and rational thinkers.
It was the year we grew up and stopped believing in the bogeyman.
Everything that was written about man, god
and the relationship between the two before that date is a complete waste of time.
We do ourselves no favours by dwelling on it.
Draw a line under it and start afresh.
Two years on, to the day...I have subsequently decided that although 1859 is the ideal symbolic year zero it is not going to happen, and there is now a better year zero on the horizon. Now that the year 2000 AD has faded into memory as just one year among others it has become a viable year zero. It does not signify anything. It means nothing. An armpit of a year, a nothing of a year, an ideal year zero! It has gone, and in passing not a great deal has changed. So why not use that zero of a year as a year zero? I can see no reason for anybody to object. The beauty of using 2000 AD as the year zero is the simplicity. Just cut off the Christian reference off the end and take 2000 off the figure. Everything else remains the same. Any child competent to be handling mathematics in any form is capable of subtracting 2000. Once people have made the decision to do it the process is painless, just write the year as two digits as we lazy people are inclined to do anyway. That is it. I was born in 1963, it is now 02. You don't need to make a big song and dance about it just drop the two thousand. It actually makes life much easier. No longer will we have to worry about what to call the year. “Two thousand and two” is quite a mouthful, two thousand and eleven is even more of a mouthful. At some stage people are going to start to consider using twenty to signify the century, as in twenty-oh-nine, almost certainly by twenty-eleven. That is when we make our move. When they are at their most vulnerable. When linguistic uncertainty is at its peak, that is when we simply say, “why not just call it eleven? You know, year eleven? What kind of idiot is going to mix it up with 11 AD? Wouldn't it be so much simpler?” So this is the plan. Just do it. Just drop the two thousand, the why two kay and all that stuff. Who needs it? If you write a cheque and date it 02 the bank will honour it. Why make a big deal about it? I am moving over to the new system now, bit by bit. There is no need to throw out the old calendar in one fell swoop. We can adjust. Change things when they need changing. We have our agenda but the timetable is our own. Time is on our side. We will win. We will bury them. 11 April 02 |
For a calendar to be effective it needs to be univerally used and understood. I am not sure how realistic it is to have a new chronology, but there is certainly one thing we can do quite easily, that is to quote years as being CE and BCE. In the Common Era and Before the Common Era. This should not be seen as an insult to anybody, using such a date does not imply that Jesus Christ is the source of the calendar nor does it deny it. It simply recognizes that as the lowest common denominator more people on this planet are aware of that particular chronology than any other. There is even the advantage that if they want to the Christians can think to themselves that it stands for Christian Era and is thus superior to the use of Latin in Anno Domini.
The global era calendar requires the use of CE dating for most historical dates, but allows GE dating for the present and the future.
Update:1 January 2005
I have decided to give in to the inevitable here, the Global Era idea was neat but it isn't practical and it isn't an idea that is making headway. So Debate Unlimited will now use standard Common Era dating, starting today, 1st January 2005 CE.