How can a date that is an arbitrary yet accepted date be wrong? That's like saying my son James' name is still under debate because his teacher likes to call him "hey kid".
There is no global debate. The date is just a label that's been accepted. Just because you don't know it, doesn't mean it's under debate and anyone who says they can argue that it isn't the date, is just a moron so please, for your own sake, just own up to your mistake.
( and yes, I agree there are other calendars but there are no popular ones that have the same year yet count centuries any other way).
When you say year 2000 or anything close to that, it's accepted that you're talking about the Gregorian Calendar.
I don't chase you around and I don't comment on Tebow. I just think your attempt to muddy the waters is embarrassing to you. Just my 2 cents.
I think we're setting aside (1) the fact that the calendar's changed from Julian to Gregorian, and (2) the fact that the basis of the arbitrary system actually probably happened at a time other than the year 1.
The guts of the argument seem to be that we have a system of integers that has no 0 to it. You were in the year 1, or the year -1 (that is, 1 CE or 1 BCE.)
So, setting the birth of Jesus to be in the first year of the common era, when Jesus is 1 year old, it's the year 2. When Jesus is 2 years old, it's the year 3. And so on.
Were Jesus to live to be 100, it would be the year 101 on his 100th birthday.
Said another way, the first century (100 years) would be over in the year 101, not the year 100. Similarly with the second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries. Without killing too many pixel-trees by listing them all, one could conclude that the twentieth 100 years, or the twentieth century, would end in 2001.
On the other side of the debate would be another convention, based not on adding units of 100 years, but on knocking a couple of zeroes off the date and adding 1. So the year 99 has no zeroes to knock off, so the value of the century is 0 -- then you add 1, to yield "first century." In the year 100, you knock off the zeroes for a value of 1, then add the obligatory 1, and get 2 -- putting the year 100 in the second century (like the year 101, 102, etc.)
At the end of 1999, therefore, we partied like it was 1999, rather than waiting 1 more year and partying like it was 2000.
This comes down to a purist vs. conventionalist approach to the counting of centuries. It's very difficult, to me, to call either of them "wrong." I suppose we're doomed to define our terms whenever we talk about centuries,
if we want to use a definition other than that which is commonly accepted.
I think the common convention is to say that in the 2000 election, American voters chose George W. Bush as the first president elected in the twenty-first century, although good arguments can be made that both terms of this assertion are demonstrably false.
