World Magazine
April 25, 1998
Volume 13
Number 16               
	
The year zero campaign
By Chris Stamper                

Zeroing Christ out of the calendar

If secularists can call for taking God out of public schools, why not
take Christ out of the calendar? That's the plan of the Year Zero
Campaign.

Alan Dechert, a computer programmer for the city of Sacramento (who's
trying to help fix the 2000 bug for a living), wants the year after
1999 to be year zero. After all, if computers will think they're
living in year 00, why not people?

According to Mr. Dechert, we live in a New Age and the days of A.D.
need to be replaced by N.E. (New Era). "Most people in the world are
not Christian," he says. "Many feel that a numbering system that is
not based on any religious event would be more reasonable and fair."

The less controversial reason for year zero is that starting with
zero means there will less confusion over the beginning and ending of
decades and centuries. Even though the big parties will be held at
the end of 1999, the real end of the 20th century comes in the year
2000.

Mr. Dechert, a Unitarian Universalist, is banging the drum in
cyberspace (www.go2zero.com) in his campaign for year zero. The big
Internet bookseller, Amazon.com, offers his year zero calendar.
Earlier this month he announced that secular humanist guru Paul Kurtz
had endorsed his movement. "Human consciousness is now global," Mr.
Kurtz beamed. "We need a new planetary ethics expressing this and
transcending the chauvinistic divisions of the past."

Year zero sounds like a fringe movement, but so is every other piece
of political correctness: Christmas break is now winter vacation. The
traditional calendar makes Jesus the center-point of human history,
but the new calendar would erase the past and start history over from
scratch. The new beginning of human history would be the advent of
the computer age.


  
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