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[MetalSlimeHunt]

Maybe you're missing the American perspective.

News flash: Large portions of the world aren't American! And you won't get anywhere by trying to push out religion in a quite frankly hostile manner. If you want a climate of religious tolerance, take a lesson from multi-religious countries like South Africa: Muslims celebrating Christmas and Christians celebrating the end of Ramadan, simply because their neighbors do as well.
What you are trying to achieve is religious sterility. But sterility is inherently unstable; so either religion will creep back in or you will have to have guardians watching with eagle eyes, squashing any supposed attempt at religiousness in the state, amounting to what paradoxically might be called an agnostic theocracy. You are simply changing the goal of the Puritan thinking you as an American inherited from your ancestors instead of freeing yourself from it!

Actually, you'll get everywhere by pushing out religion. Secularism pushed religion out of government, or at least tries to, and it's one of the best things we've ever done from ourselves. South Africa is hardly a model for stability, constantly on the verge of ethnic and religious conflict with a 1 1/2 party system ruling over it all. It's one of the few cases where I'd agree with Owlbread's mass succession ideas.

As for the theocracy claims, you make me laugh. "No u" is not exactly a hard hitting argument. All secularism does is create the conditions for the state to act rationally. Frankly, what we need is more isolation of state structures from other influences. If we had a "secularism of corporations" things would also be far better than they are now. This passive acceptance of Christian dominance you're suggesting is abhorrent. It took a long time and more than a few lives to get to the point where the Church is contained in itself, and doing anything to reverse that is madness for the irreligious.

[Rolan7]

I'd love to live in a place where Christmas is a secular holiday of goodwill.  I don't.  I guess I'm jealous of you

Non-Christians I know *do* generally celebrate Christmas to some extent, since their families/friends/coworkers are all doing it.  But it's not secular.  The carols, stories, and iconography are everywhere.  It's an incredibly uncomfortable day for me and some of my close friends because we have to sit around and take it, or be considered rude thin-skinned radicals who hate fellowship.  Again, I'm glad this isn't the case for you, but here it is really quite awful, and can't be discussed openly.

So no, I don't want some... "agnostic theocracy".  I'd just like to gently push the Christian dogma out of some scientific terms, and maybe not feel like a conciliatory shit every Christmas.  But the religious right won't stand for that, and APPARENTLY some non-Americans don't understand know how good they've got it.

Edit: Now I'm going back to playing Dawn of War Soulstorm as the Ecclesiarchy.  It's surprisingly cathartic

[Kadzar]

"Hurr durr destroy religions" is neither the point nor a goal, fruitperson. It's to stop using excluding language when possible, particularly for general use stuff. Things like this topic is small potatoes... but it is potatoes. And every little bit helps break a cultural belief that it's okay to just casually disregard huge swathes of the human population without good reason. Even just suborning a previously established system with more currently palatable terminology is pretty good -- what christians did to winter solstice is a pretty good example case of how to do this sort of thing, in general.

People get influenced by subconscious junk all the ruddy time, and stuff like the AD/BC thing is precisely the sort of venue that sort of thing works through. Few singular instances are major influences, but the issue is in congregate -- thousands of little things working together to foster, say, xenophobia or bigotry or whatever particular strain of virulent ignorance is in vogue at this moment. With this one, it's one tiny message saying, "We don't give a fuck about anyone not part or descendant of the christian cultural hegemony" and another tiny one saying, "Christian terminology in our culture is normal and acceptable, even if it's effectively snubbing parts of our population". Sure, it's just tiny ones, and singular instances, but in the face of dozens or hundreds of similar messages, it adds the zog up.

Is it really not evident why things like that shouldn't be changed, when possible?

But you can't change minds through legislation alone. I highly doubt European pagans switched from their solstice celebrations to Christmas because Christians had this new holiday they came up with and they were like, "screw all our traditions; let's do this instead!" I think it more likely that they switched because they became Christians, and even then the Christians had to incorporate stuff from solstice to make that happen.

[Darvi]

I say that if you're going to get rid of the letters, don't replace them and use negative numbers like normal people do.

[Helgoland]

I say that if you're going to get rid of the letters, don't replace them and use negative numbers like normal people do.

That's the first novel idea I've heard in this thread - I like it!

[Orange Wizard]

I'm probably going to start doing that just because of the novelty.

[Frumple]

But you can't change minds through legislation alone.

I... didn't say anything about legislation. Just. Do what we're doing already. The fields that actually use the system in question are already starting to shift into using CE/BCE, at least among english speakers. Use the system (or something more appealing -- Darv's got a good idea, there) and encourage others to use it, as well. At least with this subject, soft influence is probably going to do the job just fine.

[Flying Dice]

We could pin year 0 at the age of the oldest known human remains, which would make this year very approximately 195,000. Or if you want to wank it in that way, 0 109 14.M195, more or less.

[Dutchling]

Or just keep doing what we're doing right now, and not have a year zero at all...

[Flying Dice]

Which doesn't make sense if we're going to go the positive/negative route. Have you ever seen a numberline which goes: -2, -1, 1, 2...? I'm pretty sure that -1 + 1 != 1. 

[Kadzar]

We'll just make the year 0 exist halfway between year 1 and year -1, shortening both those years by half to make up the difference. Or year 0 could just be a pocket dimension that existed between December 31, -1 and January 1, 1.

[Orange Wizard]

AD 0 is a thing. The numbers would go -2, -1, 0, 1, 2.

[Dutchling]

AD 0 is a thing. The numbers would go -2, -1, 0, 1, 2.

Year zero does not exist in the Anno Domini/Common Era system usually used to number years in the Gregorian calendar and in its predecessor, the Julian calendar. In this system, the year 1 BC is followed by AD 1.

[Orange Wizard]

I really should check Wikipedia before making a statement, huh.

[scriver]

Year 2000 was quite a big thing, it should be the basis of a new modern year system. So now would be 14 Y2K and 2000 years ago would be 2000 B2K

:v