Moments in Time 2: The Broken Calendar
Believe it or not, this is a two year late follow-up essay.
⚠️ Disclaimer: This essay critiques all calendar systems for their practical shortcomings. If you're worried this is targeting Islam unfairly (it’s not), feel free to skip to ‘Section 2: Your Calendar Doesn’t Work Either’ to see just how universal the dysfunction is.
This isn't about religion. It's about calendars. It so happens that all calendars are religious.
The Islamic Calendar Doesn’t Work.
I used to think Ramadan always fell during the hottest months. Maybe it is scorching sun I feel during ramadan, a game of telephone, or just coincidence. I mean, fasting from sunrise to sunset in summer heat sounds like a powerful act of spiritual and physical endurance.
But then I noticed: Ramadan moves. It shifts about eleven days earlier each year, cycling through every season. Some years it’s in July, others it’s in December. That’s because the Islamic (Hijri) calendar is strictly lunar — it doesn’t anchor itself to the solar year at all.
That’s fine for religious tradition. And I love my Jewish tradition, so I can’t knock theirs. But it’s a logistical nightmare if you want to run, say, a government, school system, or shipping schedule. Planning 5+ years ahead with a calendar that floats through the seasons raises issues.
This quirky calendar remains in wide use across the Muslim world, even in oil-rich nations with access to atomic clocks and moon-mapping satellites. What does that tell us about the way we think about time?
And here’s the kicker: some Muslim countries still use visual moon sightings to determine the start of the month. Meaning you might not know when your holiday begins until someone literally sees the moon and tells everyone. That might work for herders, not for hospitals and airlines.
Considering how many calendars predate this one, someone commented to me, “It’s like the person who copies all the answers from another person’s test, only to later learn the teacher rearranged the order of the questions.”
Of course, the Islamic calendar isn’t supposed to be for secular planning — it’s for sacred time. But it still affects millions in civic life. And when the calendar used for daily logistics doesn’t align with the actual seasons, that’s... a problem.
This isn’t a dunk on Islam. It’s a criticism of relying on any single-purpose system for every purpose. Take a look at the table below to get a visual of what I mean.
1b. Visual Guide to Calendar Strengths & Flaws
2. Your Calendar Doesn’t Work Either
Before anyone gets defensive or offensive, let me, for a third time, be perfectly clear: all major calendar systems suck. Each one fails at least one of the basic things you’d want from a usable calendar.
A calendar should do three things. It should: 1. track the seasons (so your harvest festival doesn't land in mid-winter). 2. maintain a consistent year length (so birthdays and taxes don’t drift into absurdity). 3. be standardizable (so people in different regions can coordinate without divine intervention).
Again, the “trust me bro” system much of the world has adopted might work if you're herding goats, not if you’re managing international supply chains.
The Gregorian calendar is the one most of the world uses. It is a Frankenstein monster of misaligned months, arbitrary leap years, and inconsistent logic. It works… okay. But it’s not rational. It’s not even symmetrical, with uneven months.
Our calendar is good for people who believe in horoscopes, not people who believe in science.
The Chinese and Jewish calendars? Impressively precise for their time. But again — they’re specialized. Luni-solar, complex, and great at bridging sacred and seasonal time. Not great for booking international flights or balancing fiscal quarters.
Before you laugh at my (Jewish) calendar or our cousin’s calendar, remember you’re relying on a system based on a Pope’s decision in the 1500s. PS I got time to educate/remind you.
Image credit: https://in.pinterest.com/pin/387731849189767163/ (Tencent QQ MKT Team)
3. Sacred Time vs Secular Time
Religious calendars are not inherently bad. They preserve tradition. In fact, the Jewish and Chinese calendars are fascinating because they attempt to bridge the gap between ritual tradition and seasonal alignment. The Jewish calendar is luni-solar, meaning it tracks the moon but also shoves in an extra month every few years to keep Passover in spring, as commanded. It obeys ancient commandments while avoiding complete chaos.
Pesach, Tu B’Shvat, Purim, Sukkot, and Tu B’Av all align with the full moon. So these Jewish holidays basically signify: beware werewolves. Rosh Hashanah lands on a new moon. You get an empty sky, perfect for fireworks or, in Israel’s case, rockets from our celebratory neighbors. Chanukah, the holiday American Jews (not Israeli Jews) tend to inflate in importance, isn’t tied to any lunar phase. It’s about as astrologically relevant as your star sign.
The Chinese calendar, also luni-solar, is complex and used primarily for festivals, astrology, and tradition. New Year bounces around within a seasonal window, but it doesn't end up in July. These calendars work because their users know the difference between sacred time and business time. They don’t pretend one calendar can do everything. They specialize.
So the question is: why hasn’t the Islamic world adopted a two-calendar system? There seems to be fear that acknowledging the lunar calendar's limits undermines its legitimacy. When I’ve asked Muslim friends, they implied their calendars were not built to tell time as we know it.
South Park has joked about Jesus birthday and NYE parties several times.
4. Using (One of) Jesus' Alleged Birthdays As a Standard
Like a broken record (pun intended), I’ll repeat: all calendars suck. So let’s focus on your calendar next, the most popular one in the modern world.
The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582, over 1500 years after the birth of Jesus Christ (superstar!), and yet it counts years based on that event. Please imagine saying, “Wow! What a fantastic event!” and then waiting 1500 years to record it.
This calendar was designed to correct drift in the older Julian calendar, which had let the equinox slide off course by ten days. While it was a scientific improvement, it was also a political move from the Pope. Til today, science progress is regularly hindered by religion. [See antisemites destroying science research because ‘zionism’ for modern examples https://www.thefp.com/p/stanford-hamas-lab-investigation ]
But as the brilliant mind of Bert Kreischer [/s] pointed out, the Roman Empire had excellent record-keeping. We know the exact dates of reigns of obscure emperors and provincial governors. But Jesus? We don’t know the year, let alone the month. We have virtually no evidence of when Jesus was actually was born, but insist it is some date in Year 0.
Except there is no Year 0 in the Gregorian Calendar. It goes from 1 BC to 1 AD. I’ll spare you the rant about indexing from 0, not 1, since all programers learn it on day 0 of their studies.
Centuries later, the date December 25 was chosen by many Christians, and you’re not supposed to ask why it lands so close to Saturnalia and winter solstice celebrations, or why it lands so far from tax season back when Israel was under Roman occupation. And def don’t ask why we count 1 AD as the first year when 98% of the year came before Dec 25. [PS In China the year counts from the start. So if you’re born in Jan 1 AD or Dec 1 AD, you’re the same age. Maybe we are just using the Chinese system here.]
Every time I visit South America, I learn about a new date for celebrating Jesus’ birthday. Western churches celebrate Christmas on the 25th. Orthodox churches go with January 7. Some Armenians use January 6. We are, in effect, anchoring the entire modern concept of time to a birthday that no one can prove ever happened, on a date that no one agrees on, from a calendar invented by a Pope because the other calendar didn’t work, again, despite being made many centuries after the Chinese and Jewish calendars.
Doesn’t that seem like a weird hill for civilization to die on? Why didn’t the pope just decide our Dec 25 is actually Jan 1? Yes and yes.
Bonus observation, I’m going to shoehorn in here despite it having nothing to do with “moments in time:” In the US, everything is haunted. Every building, ground, park. Hospital? Haunted. Hotel lobby? Haunted. Spirit Halloween Stores? Obviously extra haunted. But in Israel I don’t ever hear ghost stories. Except the one. It’s like the entire regional ghost budget was used on the Christian messiah, and everyone else didn’t feel spooked out by it, so now all the supernatural stories happen outside of the Holy Land. Ironic, isn’t it?
Image credit: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/911 using Monday, the Christian start of the week, as 1
5. Conclusion: 13 Months of 28 Days
Let’s get #poli-charged (politically charged, a term coined on the Workaholics podcast “This is Important!”) to close this off. We need to separate religion from measurement systems to progress. Our calendar shouldn’t have to do with the undocumented birth of a messiah of a fellow Jew, who as far as I understand, kept insisting, “really, you guys, it’s not me!”
I’m glad that Jews, Hindus, Chinese and Muslim communities keep their ancient calendars alive for cultural purposes. Sacred time has value. But let’s make one neutral calendar for everyone.
In considering a better calendar, science-y people have parallel thoughts. I thought of this theoretical 13 month calendar when I was in high school. I went to college and had a physics professor profess the exact same idea, the exact same way, based on the exact same logic. And I’m sure 1000s, maybe more, of woke individuals have thought of this one calendar to rule them all. Now I periodically see it in meme format, with Jesse Pinkman, comments filled with incorrect math that reminds me how we got to this weird place in the first place.
For those who don’t know this idea: Imagine a calendar with 13 months, each exactly 28 days. Quick maths: 13 * 28 = 364 days. We have a Jew and a Christian arm wrestle to decide if every 1st of every year is a Sunday or Monday. You always know the day of the week by the date. Let’s say the Christian wins, because Jews aren’t known for their athletic abilities, then every 1st of the month is a Monday. Every 28th is a Sunday. Forever. There is no 29-31.
We keep things simple.
We are then about 1.25 days short of a year. To make up the difference to the solar year, we add a 14th short "month" for the leap day or days—a special week that exists outside the normal calendar structure. Think of it as a bonus track, like those secret tracks on CDs where you had to fast forward for a few minutes to find it. You don't use it for appointments, birthdays, or deadlines. It's a reset. Every year, we have one purge day, and on leap years, we get two.
To implement such a system, we would need a lot less religious zealots. We then have international science committees decide on the ideal start date. Because you know, there’s so much international compliance with standards [/s]. ie, it’s not happening any time soon.
If we ever make contact with aliens, do we really want to explain that the whole world uses a system that involves alternating 30 and 31 day months, with February jammed in to make it almost work? Or that the starting point is a ghost most of the world doesn’t believe in? That’s not the world I want to live in. If nothing else, let’s just go back to the Mayan calendar.
