Australians to write Christ out of History?

Christian leaders in Australia have condemned changes to the national curriculum that will replace the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) in text books.

Under the new curriculum, which was due to be released next year but has been delayed, BC and AD will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era), BP (Before Present) and CE (Common Era).
Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney, said that taking references to the birth of Jesus Christ out of school books was an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history” that he likened to calling Christmas “the festive season”.

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 education spokesman for the opposition Liberal National Party, said it was pointless to deny Australia’s cultural heritage.
"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,” he 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.

The Reverend Fred Nile, an MP in the New South Wales parliament, described the changes as “an absolute disgrace” and the “final insult” to Australian Christians.
“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,” he said.
But the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which is responsible for developing the secondary level national curriculum, said the new terms were the increasingly common standard for the representation of dates.
While BC and AD, which translates to “in the year of Our Lord” are designations used to number years in the Christian era, the terms BCE and CE have been widely applied as secular counterparts.
The little-known term BP (before present) is a time scale used by scientists and archaeologists to date past events. The standard year of origin is 1950, reflecting the fact that carbon dating technology became more reliable in the 1950s.
A similar controversy was sparked in Britain nine years ago, when a school banned its pupils from using BC and AD. Christians complained at the time that the authorities were “imposing political correctness in schools to ensure children are cut off from the past, for fear of upsetting someone”.
Defending the change, the British Qualifications and Curriculum Authority argued, “It’s not a question of one way is wrong and one is right, more a question of which is most commonly used. CE/BCE is becoming an industry standard among historians. Pupils have to be able to recognise these terms when they come across them.