CO:REA - Reading - Saturday of Easter Weekend 2012

[Gavin Chipper]

By the way if this AD/BC system is based on Christ's birth, then surely Christmas Day is 1st January.

[Phil Reynolds]

Reminds me of those people who claimed that they weren't going to celebrate the arrival of the year 2000 but would wait until 2001 because that was the "correct" start of the new millennium, thereby managing in one statement to be party poopers, pointlessly anal, and wrong.

But that's you all over isn't it? Is it wrong though? I mean it's all arbitrary anyway, but is it particualarly wrong?

Well, anal I may be, and frequently wrong; but no party has ever by me been knowingly pooped.

Anyway, yes, this millennium stuff is all arbitrary, that's exactly my point. It's wrong to insist that 1/1/2001 has any more claim to be the start of a new millennium than 1/1/2000 has. Most of us probably celebrated the arrival of the year 2000 (or at least found it interesting) because of the rollover to a round number, a bit like people are excited when they see their car's odometer roll over from 49999 to 50000 or whatever. It would be different if 1/1/1 was a significant date in history, which might make the two thousandth anniversary of it worth marking in some way. But it wasn't.

[Stewart Gordon]

By the way if this AD/BC system is based on Christ's birth, then surely Christmas Day is 1st January.

I heard somewhere that there was some significance placed on the 8th day after someone's birth (or 7th day after as it would be known in modern English). I guess somebody assumed long ago that our calendar has used this special day as its baseline, leading to 25 December being designated as Jesus's official birthday.

It would be different if 1/1/1 was a significant date in history, which might make the two thousandth anniversary of it worth marking in some way. But it wasn't.

You mean because we weren't using the Gregorian Calendar back then?

Still, it's a basic definition that "1st millennium AD" means from 1 to 1000. It would be silly if it meant 1BC to 999AD, and then "1st millennium BC" meant 1001BC to 2BC. So they aren't "wrong" when they claim that 2001-01-01 was the start of the new millennium, arbitrary as our calendar may be.

[Richard Priest]

Not going due to practicalities and expense of getting there, but hope everyone has a good time.