First off, my condolences to the people of Haiti in the aftermath of this past Tuesday’s tragedy. And a pile of shit on Pat Robertson’s head, or the head of anyone who decides to bring any sort of theodicy into this tragedy; it’s uncalled for, and it is usually wrong in its assumptions about a tragedy.

Now, I’ve been thinking about calendar eras, and the variety of such dating systems from various religious, fraternal, scientific or political/military institutions which exist or have existed. In particular, when such institutions mark a "foundation day" upon the anniversary of a leader’s birth or a game-changing battle, such anniversaries can be taken as markings of the "revolution" that changed everything that the members or subscribers believe about the world, and that everything else originating prior to the day and year of the revolution (Year 1) are "old", "useless", "obsolete". The Anno Domini-Gregorian calendar, the French revolutionary calendar, the Islamic calendar, the Juche calendar of North Korea, and other calendars mark their "Year 1" upon their respective, rather-recent watershed moments, with previous events being declared as "pre-historic" and effectively ancient.

However, other calendars take a backward-looking approach to dating any event. The Hebrew solar calendar is dated from (as of 2010) 5770 years ago, which is believed by devout Jews as the number of years since the day of "divine" creation of the earth; the Freemason fraternity, as another related example, simply adds 4000 years to a Gregorian Anno Domini year (redesignating 2010 as 6010 AL ("Anno Lucis", meaning "Year of Light")). 

I feel that the main problem or intricacy in expanding the calendar era to a much more distant time is that events which have taken place within the Anno Domini era are much less significant in their historical weight within our consciousnesses in comparison to the many more events which have taken place prior to the Anno Domini era. In this case, the building of the ancient Egyptian empire is treated with much more contemporary feeling in the present than previously, while the Space Race is considered much less significant and world-changing than previously.

And that may be a good thing, in my opinion. It may allow us to think that events which happened in ancient Greece or ancient China or ancient India are not really "ancient" in the modern sense, but do, in fact, have a continuing role to play in world history long after their respective empires have long ago collapsed. Expanding the calendar era reduces our sense of chronocentricity, our presumption of living in (or having lived during) the "greatest age" of human history. And it expands our sense of culture to include those cultural mores which existed during times in which belief systems were much less spread across wide breadths of land.

Finally, this pic from DA is rather appealing in its positive appraisal of non-Western-"normative" female body shapes.