Ethnic cleansing of Australian schools as leaders seek to de-Christianise the dating system, according to the Telegraph (UK) and Daily Telegraph (Australia) 2 September 2011. A new national history curriculum for Australian schools has replaced the terms BC and AD for dates with the “neutral terms” BCE and CE. BCE stands for Before Common Era and CE stands for Common Era.
This act of political correctness has annoyed church leaders and politicians. Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen commented that removing BC and AD from the curriculum was an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history”. He went on to say: “It is absurd because the coming of Christ remains the centre point of dating and because the phrase ‘common era’ is meaningless and misleading”. Christopher Pyne, the Federal Opposition education spokesman said: “Australia is what it is today because of the foundations of our nation in the Judeo-Christian heritage that we inherited from Western civilisation. Kowtowing to political correctness by the embarrassing removal of AD and BC in our national curriculum is of a piece with the fundamental flaw of trying to deny who we are as a people.” Fred Nile, who is both a church leader and politician, claimed “The direction of the national curriculum is towards almost a Christian cleansing to remove from our history any references to the role Christianity had in the formation of Australia and still has today”.
It seems a majority of Daily Telegraph readers agree with these comments. An online poll with the following question: “Have the creators of the national history curriculum gone too far in ignoring Christianity?” had the following results (on 5 September): Yes 79.37% (7913 votes) No 20.63% (2057 votes)
Editorial Comment: BC stands for Before Christ, AD for Anno Domini, i.e. year of our Lord. Hence it is not really the year 2011 – it’s the year AD 2011. The use of terms BCE and CE is not neutral, even though Common Era Calendars borrow the same starting point of around 2,000 years ago. They are a deliberate attempt to deny the fact that our calendar years are numbered around the earthly life of Christ. This attempted change will not only annoy Christians, it will probably also annoy Moslems who are in no way part of the Common Era as Mohammad wasn’t even on the scene till around 600 years after it started.
Reports are now circulating that the noisy outcry against such a deliberate ethnic cleansing of education has pushed the change into the background for now. May it be long buried, but atheist Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Greens (an Australian political party) can’t help themselves but seek to deny the existence of Christ, who as the Creator is the Author and Lord of time. He created it in the beginning, and one day He will bring it to an end. Removing the reference to Him in our dates will not make Him go away. Keep watching for updates on this educational issue. (Ref. education, philosophy, world view)
Evidence News 7 September 2011