What Year is it & Where is God?
Part I
I took this photo of the sun, our nearest star, through smoky skies this past summer. The black sunspots are electromagnetic storms which emit particles into space. These particles eventually collide with dust particles in the upper atmosphere to cause the Northern Lights or the aura borealis. Design all around!
What Year is it & Where is God?
Every New Year’s Eve, most people gather together with family and friends to reflect on the past year and to welcome in the New Year with a toast. For many, this is a time of reflection and thanksgiving for the year that was and a time to eagerly welcome in the New Year with the hope that it will be as good as the past year. For others, it is a time to embrace the New Year with greater expectations and to forget about the old one with its many trials and tribulations. If you are older, you have likely lived both experiences.
Humanity has been walking the earth for a very long time. Archeologists believe Homo sapiens, our species, first appeared during the Stone Age between 40 and 100 thousand years ago. These first people were hunters and gatherers who used stone tools to defend themselves and to kill animals to eat. This period lasted a very long time until about 3000 BC in the Near East and until about 8000 BC in other parts of the world. The Bronze Age followed the Stone Age and lasted until the Iron Age began around 1200 BC. During these ages our ancestors began making tools and weapons from bronze and iron.[1] Since we have been populating this planet for tens of thousands of years; why is this year only 2023 instead of 8,023 or some other date to reflect the age of our human existence on this planet?
AD and BC
When I grew up and through most of my adult life, the year was followed by the letters AD, so this year would be 2023 AD. When studying ancient history, the letters BC are used to frame the time period. For example, the reign of Herod the Great was 37-4 BC and the second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem built by King Solomon was completed in 516 BC, or BC 516.[2]
The letters AD stand for ‘Anno Domini,’ which is a Latin phrase for ‘In the year of our Lord,’[3] which refers to the birth of Jesus Christ. The letters BC stand for ‘Before Christ’[4]. It was in the year 532 AD that a monk by the name of Dionysius Exiguus started a system of counting years that became common by about 1400 AD in Christian countries, primarily in Europe.[5] He recognized that the most important historical event in the history of the world was the birth of Jesus Christ in Palestine. The Incarnation, when Jesus took on human flesh and became man, was the pivotal event that changed world history. Saint John Paul II often pointed out that it is only through the Incarnation that the mystery of man makes sense.
All time after the birth of Jesus would be designated by AD, which recognized the significance of his birth in Bethlehem. All time that occurred before the birth of Christ would be designated as BC. Because the year of Christ’s birth would be year zero, an event that happened 100 years before Christ would be 100 BC. Therefore, an event that occurred in 300 BC would have taken place 100 years before an event that happened in 200 BC. An event, like the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple of King Solomon in 70 AD occurred 70 years after the birth of Jesus.
The Gregorian calendar
The calendar we use today is called the Gregorian calendar which was introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII.[6] This calendar basically continued what Dionysius had started over one thousand years earlier. Since a solar year (the time it takes the earth to make one revolution around the sun) is actually 365.242 days long, a leap day is added to February every four years to bring the calendar in sync with the solar year. Without this extra day in the leap year, the calendar would be off by one day every four years, which over a span of a hundred years would move the first day of spring from March 21, well into the middle of April.[7]
No matter how vehement atheists are in their nonbelief of God, it does not change the fact that the birth of Christianity was the pivotal historical event that has given our world a meaningful way to record our modern-day history, as well as our ancient history. Even our day-to-day activities that are reflected in the seven days of the week are rooted in the science of metaphysics, because these seven weekdays are the fruits of the Biblical seven days of Creation. The scriptures state that God rested on the seventh day and that is why we should rest on Sunday, to recharge our body and soul.
When I was a kid, most people rested on Sunday and all the stores were closed, but since we have removed God from the public square, Sunday has just become another day of commerce, which is not good for our physical and mental health or our spiritual wellbeing. These historical links are factual and are an integral part of our modern-day world.
The dictionary also defines the Christian era[8]. This is the time period from the birth of Jesus Christ up to this present day, so we are living in the Christian era whether we like it or not. The Gregorian calendar is now used worldwide to designate the year, so all countries and all citizens can know what year it is. This has facilitated commerce worldwide. This system has worked well and not only enables us to know when we are born and when we die, but it enables historical events to be dated and recorded accurately for all time.
De-Christianization of Society
If you listen to the news today, it is obvious that Christian values and Christianity itself are under attack around the world. God himself is on trial. The new atheists are well aware of this trend in society and have taken full advantage of this by publishing many books in the last twenty years, books like: The God Delusion, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, Waking up, God is not Great, Mount Improbable, Breaking the Spell and The Moral Landscape, which all deny the existence of God and attack Christianity, in particular. This trend is spreading from North America and England to Europe and Australia as well as in all the Communist countries around the world. The Christian faith, in particular, is attacked in the media at large, in the movie industry, in the publishing industry, in our universities, in the courts of our land, in our House of Commons, Congress, and in the Senate. Today, the goals of the attacks are enshrined in the laws of many of the wealthiest countries in our world, laws which are an affront to many Christian values.
When I was a teenager in the sixties, if someone talked about a world where unborn babies would be legally killed in their mother’s womb, for any reason, or a world where marriage was not between one man and one woman, or a world where if you wanted your doctor to kill you, the doctor would, or a world where the experts state that your gender is not determined at birth, but only when you decide whether you are male or female, or a world where compelled speech is enshrined in law, or a world where one’s freedom of conscience is not protected or a world where the freedom of religion is not protected, or a world where you were told that if you go to school today, you and many of your schoolmates and teachers will come out of the school in body-bags because you would have been killed a shooter, my generation would have said, “Are you crazy! It could never happen!” Yet, it has happened in many countries and dozens of countries have enshrined many anti-life, anti-Christian, unnatural ideas, into law.
Free Speech
This way of thinking has pervaded most universities, which are to be the bastions of free thought and speech. However, free speech is not welcomed on the majority of campuses and as a result, there are very few universities that will let a faithful Christian or a faithful Jew express their views openly in a forum on their campuses. Today, the precepts of Jesus are not officially welcomed on the majority of university campuses in the United States and Canada.
In the world of scientific academia, if a scientist is a Christian, they cannot express their views openly if they hope to advance in their academic careers. This does not say much for the tolerance of science or academia, but it does say a lot about the concerted effort in our secular society to screen God from the public square, our institutions, and our everyday lives.
Jordan Peterson is a world-renowned speaker and writer on the issues of our times and was also a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada. Just google his name to see how the speech police have tried to tell him what he can and cannot say when addressing students over gender ideology. There are universities around the country who will not allow renowned speakers, like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro, who is a faithful Jew from the United States, to speak on their campuses. The reason is because their speech challenges the ideas of the Marxist-woke left. Free speech is under attack in Canada, United States, Europe, Australia, and in all Communist countries.
I’d love to hear from you:).
[1] World Book Encyclopedia: World Book, Inc. 1991
[2] Ibid
[3] The Oxford Dictionary & Thesaurus: Oxford University Press, Inc. 1996.
[4] Ibid
[5] The World Book Encyclopedia: World Book, Inc. 1991.
[6] The World Book Encyclopedia: World Book, Inc. 1991.
[7] Ibid
[8] The Oxford Dictionary & Thesaurus: Oxford University Press, Inc. 1996.