The Australian Curriculum Authority has ruled that the terms AD and BC are out of date and out of bounds for secondary schools. In a world besieged by political correctness it was bound to happen and remains bound to happen in NZ – unless we see sense.

AD of course stands for ‘Anno Domini,’ the year of our Lord, and BC for ‘Before Christ.’ They will be replaced in the curriculum by CE (common era) and BCE (before the common era). It is a PC move to remove references to Christ in a secular education system.

The irony is that it is just a question of terminology. The Gregorian calendar on which we reference our dates remains unaltered so that the implicit referencing of time to the advent of Christ is still there. (It’s not exact, of course. Most early Christian writers placed Jesus’ birth in 3-2 BC, the 42nd year of Augustus).

But if the Aussies were serious about this it might also be necessary to remove the reference to Pope Gregory. We could just call it the ‘Western calendar.’ But oh dear, the term ‘Western’ derives from the notion of the Western church and the Eastern church, so we can’t have that either!

What about the Greenwich calendar, then? Greenwich Mean Time is nice and neutral, though it does smack a little of the colonial Empire and the French were never happy about it.

There is a little problem in the fact that the people who set up the Greenwich Observatory in 1675 AD were Christians. Oh, and they were closely linked to all those Christians who founded the Royal Society and established the modern scientific revolution – Newton, Hooke, Halley and their contemporaries. The Aussies should also abandon modern science in their curriculum because its very roots are steeped in Christian institutions and philosophy.

We could go on about democracy, human rights and our modern understanding of individual freedom – all products of a Christian world view. We could black-list Bach’s music, all dedicated “to the glory of God.”

This of course is all nonsense. Units of time may be in seconds, a truly neutral term, but most units in science are named after notable individuals: Watt, Ohm, Ampere, Henry, Farad, Tesla, Gauss, Oersted, Joule, Newton, Pascal, Boltzmann, Planck and so on. This has not been without its critics because these are all white, male, European! Nonetheless we remain sensible and see the merits of retaining these terms and, in so doing, honouring those who contributed to the advance of knowledge.

While these individuals did indeed push back the frontiers of knowledge, not one was indispensable. But without Jesus there would be no Christianity and everything that has followed from it. Whatever your religious beliefs, of all people across the past two millennia Jesus is surely the most notable in terms of his impact on the course of history, on ethics, culture and on religion.

To this we can add his indirect impact on philosophy, science and democratic freedoms. If we can reference our various measures to notable individuals whose contribution is not uniquely pivotal to science, we can surely reference our time to one who has been truly unique in his contribution to the world as we know it.

To banish AD and BC from our schools would be modern day book burning – the sort of thing that totalitarian communist states attempted throughout the 20th century.

We seem hell-bent on denying our spiritual and cultural heritage. Fortunately the focal role of Christian faith in Maori and Pacifika culture, and in some of our immigrant communities, serves as a buffer. It may yet rescue us from the PC de-Christianising of our national life and institutions.

• Dr Jeff Tallon is a physicist specialising in the field of superconductivity.