A vista to avoid if you are committed to the orderly

The recent discussion about why history is now measured exactly as it was in the time of Christian historians, with just the labels altered to sound less religious, has another dimension. In fairness the historians deciding on how to label their dating faced the dauntingness of the unmeasurable and the human intellect does it's best to avoid that vista of the unfathomable. In this instance I am referring to the fact that numbering has to start someplace, and there is NO convenient place in a world accustomed to being able to start numbering with a definite historical event. The grand appeal of 1 AD is that it was nailed into (not a wood crossbeam but) a definable event. Now that this starting place is less obvious, where would the numbering start? It occurs to me that maybe 6000 BCE, which is reported to be about the time human writing started. But of course this is a convention too, and hardly less speculative than the recently popular system. And then we would have the clumsiness of some events being counted backwards from 6000 BCE. You do need an edge, even though the point which I would like to highlight is that there IS no edge to count from, not really.

Which brings up the extent the human intellect will go to to avoid realizing how mythical edges really are. That might be our next question.

What divides BCE and CE?

The conventions for expressing dates are a nice example of binary thought. What is any real difference between 11:59pm and 12:01 am. Yet they are considered a day apart. But what is fun to notice is the terminology that used to indicate the time before and after the supposed birth of the Christian deity. This used to be usage to which all westerners adhered in speaking of dates, regardless of their personal religious views. To do otherwise would be to be incomprehensible to one's readers. At some point in the 20th century the provincialness of this convention became so obvious that the iniitals were changed from B.C. to B.C.E., where the latter stood for Before Common Era. So we apparently are more cosmopolitan historians now. Maybe CE stands for Cosmopolitan Era.

Except----there is still this verbal gulf between indivisible worlds, a chasm signifying nothing except the silliness of which the human intellect is capable. On what significant grounds does history come galloping up to 1 BCE (rear up, perhaps,} and then leap across to 1 CE? At least the Christians had a reason which to them was a convincingly major event by which to order history. What could be the importance now which leads us to divide history into two severed pieces? Well, one thing is the new dating convention points to the tenacity of the human intellect in dividing everything into twos, a bisection which enables human mentation to reason (that is, hit the asphalt) at all. Still, for some, being able to count just to two, barely counts.