Just the usual battle between meaning and non-meaning

                                               Secular is groovier


With non-meaning triumphant, this time.  The BBC adopts division of history into "CE" and "BCE" rather than BC and AD, because it is "secular," which the modern mind equates with nice, cool, and proper.

However, it is also absurd.  As Francis Philips notes:

[In the words of] Leofranc Holford-Strevens, author of A Short History of Time (2005) . . .: “If [this timeline] does not commemorate the birth of Christ it has no business to exist at all, for no other event of world-historical significance took place in either 1 BC or AD 1… Although, as a date for the birth of Jesus Christ, the epoch is almost certainly wrong, it remains a commemoration of that event. Attractive, especially in a globalised age, as a purely secular era may appear, the Christian era cannot be made secular by denying its origin.”

Read the whole thing here.