Friday, August 10, 2018

Anno Domini and Common Era

When I was growing up in the 90's there was a push among academia to replace the occurrence of AD and BC to keep dates in scholarly works with CE and BCE. The reasoning for the is that "Anno Domini" is Latin for "Year of our Lord" and refers specifically to the era after Christ's birth, and since not everyone accepts the Dominion of the God of Christ, a more religiously neutral term is necessary.

But who are these people that don't accept the Dominion of God, and why do they want to erase God's remembrance from the calendar?

Anno Domini was only used in the first place because all previous reckonings of time used the name of the Roman Emperors to categorize eras, so for example the first year of the reign of the Emperor Diocletian would be 1 Anno Diocletian. A Christian monk didn't like that, especially since Diocletian was a notorious persecutor of Christians, so he erased the name of Diocletian by counting from the year of Christ's birth, not the death of the Roman Emperor, and since the Roman Catholic Church was the guardian of Western knowledge for several hundred years, that is what we've used since.

Why did we suddenly decide to change this in the late 20th century?

"We" didn't decide anything. A growing demographic in academia wanted to change this convention because they had never accepted Christ and had been enjoying unprecedented acceptance and influence in the Western world, and so wanted to change whatever they could to suit themselves.  It wasn't Muslims, because every Islamic scholarly work begins and ends with the name of Allah, and every Muslim can't help but tell you "Insha Allah" for something he never plans to do anyway, and Islam has its own lunar calendar anyway. I doubt Muslims ever wanted to make a term religiously neutral.

It wasn't even atheists, because their voices were always more scattered and atheists tend to create replacement religions, they they just don't call religions.

No, it was the growing influence of the Jewish bloc in Western academia. They are demographically numerous, organized, have their own scholarly traditions, and have a hatred of Christianity that most Muslims do not willfully comprehend. The erasure of Jesus' legacy, and his followers has been an agenda of organized Judaism basically since the crucifixion, or wherever and whenever his teachings became more popular than Talmudic teachings. To the Jewish people, Jewish law supersedes all other law, even that of the state or nation.

And replacing "Anno Domini" with "Common Era" was a targeted campaign in academia that played on the sympathies of Protestants and people who didn't want to be "too religious", and used as its unwitting henchmen atheists, agnostics, and anyone who ascribed to an alternate religion like Wicca, earth worship, Freemasonry, and whatever else.

Sadly, even Muslims were duped, and willingly went along with this plan. They thought it made things more "fair" for their religion of Islam, when in reality it does anything but.  Muslims in the West play the dupe for every new age, anti-religious movement because they are told that it will help represent Islam, when all it actually does is tear down the structures of Christianity, and Muslims are more than willing to be the attack dog for these pernicious causes.

Does CE and BCE really replace the remembrance of Christ? After all the dates are the same, you just replace the post script.

In that case, why bother rewording at all? The birth of Christ, or the first year of Dominion, is an actual point in time. We can calculate any date from that date if we use it as a point of reference, just as if we can use the date of the ascension of a Roman Emperor, or anything else, but "Common Era" is not a definite point of time, you cannot travel to any one point in time and say "this is the beginning of the common era, and a second before this is before the common era". "Common Era", as a means of measuring time, is worthless.

And, as an aside, this is how I know it's a conspiracy, because like all late 20th century left wing a Jewish conspiracies, it replaces something real and quantifiable with something meaningless and nebulous, like Feminism and the Patriarchy, like racism, like antisemitism, like homophobia.

It is the duty of anyone intellectually honest, rigorous and scientific to reject these shallow replacements and hold onto the truth, no matter how ancient it's discovery might be. Yet sadly, those who should be the guardians of truth in academia are doing the complete opposite, and are embracing meaningless new age fads.

Ranking the Assassin's Creed games

AC1 is the template for all the other AC games, but is itself a deeply uneven game with good ideas but mixed execution, and a lot of repetitive gameplay.

AC2 is best AC

AC:Brotherhood is an expansion pack for AC2

AC:Revelations is an expansion pack for AC2, but by this point the formula has gotten stale.

I did not play AC3, but I haven't heard  good things about it.

AC4: Black Flag is an amazing pirate simulator, but the time spent not doing pirate shit but assassin shit instead sucks.

AC:Unity is the most underrated AC game with the most gameplay content in the series, but is marred by many technical issues.

I did not play AC:Syndicate

AC: Origins is no longer an AC game, but is Far Cry set in Egypt during Classical Antiquity.

 I like OSRIC’s character sheet, and even though it’s missing some important fields for AD&D 1e and feels more like a B/X sheet, it’s st...