I once saw a Mosque with Christmas lights on it. Seriously.

Unfortunately the aboriginal Austrailians [to my knowledge] have no written records of, well, anything really. Lots of paintings and such which can be taken as similar i suppose.

However it does make it incredibly difficult to tell exactly how far back they really /do/ go, particularly since [again to my knowledge] they have been an isolated group for most of their history and so tehre are no other cultures to benchmark them against. [as opposed to say x culture being mentioned in y culture's records in relation to the reign of zed king]

Making it entirely possible that they are actually no older than the Sumerians for instance, and possibly quite younger. Also, i seem to recall they are transplants from elsewhere [viz Native Americans actually being of Mongolian stock and of relatively recent arrival], so they wouldn't really be an isolated culture and would have had contact with other ancient cultures beforehand or something.

Please correct me on any points i may be wrong on, i'm going to go dig up wiki entries on them now i think because theyre not my specialty.
[i realize those middle two paragraphs seem contradictory, but bear with me]

On further reading it seems to be fairly well accepted they migrated from SE Asia c 40-50,000 BP, mostly based on thermoluminsecent dating [which i had never heard of before]. Which seems fairly old compared to the Sumerians for instance where the earliest likely-real king was in the 23.C BCE. Shrug.

BCE? Before the Common Era? Did people really start using that? Or was that a typo?

Habit from being a history major and all.
We also tend to refer to year 0 as the year Dot because it's kinda peculiar for instance to be talking about the year of the birth of christ in a course on far eastern religious history or summat.

My dad and I are both Jewish, albeit non-practicing, and we celebrate it. My mom's side of the family is Christian.

*shrug* it's a secular holiday for a lot of people

You'll find BCE and CE in academic works. It's Christian conservatives clinging to the traditions of AD and BC that tend to prevent it from becoming popular usage.

My only concern is that 'CE' and 'BCE' both contain 'CE', which may cause confusion of drastic proportions if the 'B' is handwritten and illegible. Some better term could have been thought up. Preferably one that doesn't contain the letter 'C'.

Also, if they were going to be totally sensible, they'd pick a date that was significant for all of humanity. The end of World War 2 in 1945, or when man entered space in 1959, or the birth of Alexander the great in 356 BCE. Or the invention of agriculture, about 10 000 BCE.

But some term for timespan without religious connotations does make sense.

What do you, and the other who used the term, mean by "celebrate" exactly? I'm just curious as to what actually goes on. Mass? Tree? Presents?

It does to a world that's dominated by Christians. You forget, Christianity is the single most popular religion in the world, in all of it's forms and categories. The world is always going to have something based on the bible--even if in the end it's only names.

Either way though, does it really matter WHERE we put the bookmark? I mean, in the end, everything still happened at the same exact time.

Not to mention the vast amount of rewriting of.. everything, that would be required to change the date system [again]. I mean look at how long it took everyone to agree on Gregorian. I can't even convince the US to use metric [popularly at least, officially we already do], let alone change our whole dating system.

Christianity may be more popular than any one other religion, but don't forget that 5/6 of the world isn't Christian.

It's easier for one organization to keep something the way it is, especially when it's bigger than any other one organization, than it is for the others to band together and change said policy.

Small correction: it was paul that taught christianity to the gentiles. Peter was one of the original 12 and wouldnt have thought of it. Paul having been a gentile himself before 'taking up the cross' is the one who really spread christianity as it is now. i wont cause a big debate here, but hes the one who....nevermind i dont want to get into it. been up too long.