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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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We use the Gregorian calendar now. To my knowledge, only Orthodox Christians still use the Julian.

The Gregorian calendar is basically the same as the Julian calendar but for a tiny change in the leap year rules.

And IIRC using the pure Julian calendar is a fringe position among orthodox Christians- most of them use some kind of ‘revised Julian’ calendar that in practice is just the Gregorian calendar for everything except Easter.

And even the use of the Julian date for Easter in the West is solely to accommodate the Russians, who stick to the Julian dates for religious feasts. I’d assume if the Russians ever adopted the Gregorian dates the whole orthodox world would just move the Easter date too.

Really, the whole calendar dispute could make for an interesting effortpost, it’s grounded in the same “we don’t let the Pope tell us what dates to use” stance that motivated a lot of Protestant states to stick to the Julian for years, even centuries. The English wanted to make their own Protestant calendar with 33-year rotations. But eventually they all acknowledged the astronomical superiority of the Gregorian and adopted it. As the Orthodox world wants to do, Russian obstinacy and anti-occidental stance notwithstanding.

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