Date question

I wasnt sure where to put this so a moderator be glad to move it. But anyways, what if your a hard core atheist, then you would be against using the date system we use. for example today is 4/22/2006, 2006 years after jesus was born. but if you dont beleive in jesus why would you use our date? is there any other date method?

Originally posted by Schmidt1989
I wasnt sure where to put this so a moderator be glad to move it. But anyways, what if your a hard core atheist, then you would be against using the date system we use. for example today is 4/22/2006, 2006 years after jesus was born. but if you dont beleive in jesus why would you use our date? is there any other date method?

Actually, the secular world mostly doesn't concern itself with such trivial questions such as this. Some do and have, and instead of using AD they use CY or CE(Common Year and Common Era) after the 2006. BTW The date doesn't belong to anyone and claiming some special "ownership" of a method of measuring time is quite....arrogant IMHO.

Well, you have to have some point of reference in order to have any sort of date system, i.e. some reasonably well-defined point in time, somewhere in the past, that you can point to and say "that is time zero". We happened to have picked the year that Jesus was born. (actually, historians goofed by a few years, but the point is, they picked a year to call zero and stuck to it) It could be anything, like in the Muslim religion, their 'year zero' is the year Mohammed went to Medina. (622AD) We could just as easily have picked the birthday of Alexander the Great, the day the supernova in the Crab nebula was first seen, or any other event, to base a calendar on. It's just really hard to change it when all the millions of books we have are based on the current system.