Australia moves to eliminate B.C. and A.D. from textbooks

Christians Down Under are outraged over changes in the national school curriculum that would remove the use of Before Christ (B.C.) and Anno Domini (A.D.) in school textbooks in favor of terms that are more politically correct.  Details, from the Christian Post:

London-based Daily Telegraph reports that the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) wants to replace B.C. and A.D. (Anno Domini is Latin for “the year of our Lord”) with less religious terms like BCE (Before Common Era), BP (Before Present) and CE (Common Era).

Christopher Pyne, an education spokesperson for the Federal Opposition, says that the changes are “trying to deny who we are as a people.”

“Australia is what it is today because of the foundations of our nation in the Judeo-Christian heritage that we inherited from Western civilization,” he said.

BCE and CE are not new inventions. The terms were created in 6th century and gained popularity in the late 20th century as a means of describing time in a way that has a more universal appeal.

Though the terms would be changed in the new curriculum, the phrases still apply to the Gregorian calendar under which B.C. and A.D. were created.

Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney, calls these changes an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history.”

“It is absurd because the coming of Christ remains the center point of dating and because the phrase ‘common era’ is meaningless and misleading,” he said in an interview with the Sydney Daily telegraph.

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