Folks who study ancient history, or even Medieval history, may have noticed that recently historians amateur and professional sometimes depart from the time honored BC and AD for calendar designations, substituting instead BCE and CE.
It's goofy.
AD and BC have been used since the 6th Century and everyone everywhere knows what they mean in terms of referencing the year, even if they don't know that BC means "Before Christ" and AD means "Anno Dominae", Latin for "the year of Our Lord". BCE and CE are supposed to stand for Before the Common Era and Common Era. They equate precisely with BC and AD, except that they're wholly stupid.
They're stupid because they mean nothing at all, and the existing AD and BC have been used forever, are well established, and actually refer to an event.
The fact AD and BC refer to an event, of course, is precisely the reason that some want to substitute in now BCE and CE. They're oversensitive, have a poor sense of history, and should just get over themselves.
In order to refer to a historical date, a person ought to have a sense of history to start with. That would include, presumably, having at least a grasp of how the globally dominant calendar came about. The calendar is, of course, not required to be uniform by nature, other than that the number of days it takes the planet to rotate the sun is a constant. Outside of that, you can use any system you choose, and should you choose, you could dispense with months entirely.
However, for our own purposes, every culture that has had an advanced calendar has set out periods within it. And every culture that has had an advanced calendar has, somehow, marked the years. The Gregorian Calendar has become the globally dominant calendar. It did not become so, however, as year 1 AD was a year in which everyone on the planet suddenly was aware of each other in common.
The Gregorian Calendar is a church calendar. The Church had a great interest in calendars for its purposes, so that it could mark the liturgical seasons, feasts, and Holy Days. The calendar itself was a 1582 reform of the Julian Calendar. The Julian Calendar was one introduced by Julius Caesar, but the AD term wasn't used until number of the years relevant to the birth of Christ were introduced in the 6th Century.
Proponents of AD and BC feel that the entire BC and AD designations are entirely too religious and that they might offend people. Well, if they offer offensive it isn't very evident and to attempt to change the designations ignores the entire history of the West, and therefore ignores the Common Era.
To the extent that the Common Era is common, it's common in no small part because Western nations and empires have made it so. That's not chauvinistic, it's just fact. But the world certainly didn't become uniformly common in a political or economic sense starting in the Year 1. That date would be much more recent. But that we have a common calendar reflects the spread of European culture and influence around the globe. That calendar had a religious origin, and that origin says much about the history of the Church in European Culture from late Roman period forward. To ignore that for the sake of political correctness or the fear of wounding delicate feelings ignores historical reality. It makes no more sense to swap out BCE and CE for BC and AD than it does to make sure that nobody refers to the calendar as the Gregorian Calendar.
Indeed, the terms "Common Era" essentially commit a historical fraud, as it's not really possible to conceive of a historical calendar Common Era unless you actually refer to the birth of Christ, in which case a person is achieving the very thing that they seek to apparently avoid. What would be common about year 1, for example? Well, not very much. The Roman Empire was pretty big, but most of the cultures in the globe had never heard of it. A person could say that the Mediterranean world was on the rise, through the Romans, but a person could have said that about the earlier Greeks as well. The only thing a person could find common about the years 1 through 30 would be by referencing the events that make those years significant, which would directly refer to Christianity. A person could note, of course, that by 40AD the Apostles were spreading out throughout the known world with their message, following Christs Crucifixion, but that serves to point out that Year 1 refers to the Birth of Christ. So even explaining a basis for BC and BCE actually requires the emphasis of the very elements that the proponents of BC and BCE find so delicate to approach.
Indeed, should we do that at some point it'll become politically incorrect to use either of the other common terms for the calendar, those being the Christian Calendar or the Western Calendar, as they too will be too offensive to somebody. The calendar itself is not used uniformly by all Churches, as some of the Orthodox Churches continue to use the old Julian Calendar, although no nation does. The entire globe uses the calendar as its civil calendar, however, and at some point somebody somewhere will not that Asia, or some place, isn't the West, and therefore the name is offensive to somebody.
In other words, AD and BC are established and work. Those who would seek to remove them in favor of something else have far too little to do.
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