Do you believe in horoscopes?

[Lote-Tree]

^^ So nice to see you back Lote : ]]

(you know i don't think that much about the ancient greeks )

Abandon not ye such rich heritage that changed the western civilisations Manolia ;-)

The Furies will pursue you to the nether reaches of the kingdom of Hades ;-)

[manolia]

Abandon not ye such rich heritage that changed the western civilisations Manolia ;-)

The Furies will pursue you to the nether reaches of the kingdom of Hades ;-)

hehehehehehe i pass you score : ]]

[jmnixon95]

No, I actually do not. :3

[Baudolina]

Here is the story of a professional astrologer who turned away from the subject when he discovered it was all nonsense:

http://www.undeceivingourselves.com/S-astr.htm



and don't even get me started on homeopathy...

[Armel P]

Now let me say that I think the whole idea of star signs controlling our lives is nonsense. But recently, after a number of years, I met someone who has a very great affinity with the way I think and the things I believe in. She is a little toughie not given to self-deception, so I was surprised when she asked me my star sign and I found we were both born under the same sign. I still think it is nonsense but what do other Litnetters think about Astrology?

I don't believe it one bit.

[iamnobody]

Of course it's nonsense, but it's still fun.

[jlb4tlb]

Voodoo is much more fun!!!

[Scheherazade]

The OP:

Now let me say that I think the whole idea of star signs controlling our lives is nonsense. But recently, after a number of years, I met someone who has a very great affinity with the way I think and the things I believe in. She is a little toughie not given to self-deception, so I was surprised when she asked me my star sign and I found we were both born under the same sign. I still think it is nonsense but what do other Litnetters think about Astrology?

[YesNo]

I recently read a book on Vedic astrology and used some software to create my own horoscope. The hardest part was to find my time of birth and the latitude and longitude of the hospital where I was born, but I was able to track it down from some birth documents. I don't know what the information is trying to tell me.

[free]

Now let me say that I think the whole idea of star signs controlling our lives is nonsense. But recently, after a number of years, I met someone who has a very great affinity with the way I think and the things I believe in. She is a little toughie not given to self-deception, so I was surprised when she asked me my star sign and I found we were both born under the same sign. I still think it is nonsense but what do other Litnetters think about Astrology?

Some things have lead me to understand that there are similarities in characters between the people born in the same astrology signs. Also, once I read an astrology book foreseeing future of the world's happenings. The book had been written much further in the past from the time when I read it. I was surprised to see how many important things that had already happened in the world this book foresaw. So, I think, there may be some connections between the stars positions and things happening under them. Of course, it takes an astrology expert to 'read' and 'decipher' this cosmic 'text'.

[Dreamwoven]

The closest to science this gets is in Michel Gauquelin The Cosmic Clocks: from Astrology to a Modern SciencePaladin (1967). He uses a vast store of statistical material to show correlations. I won't go into the details here but recommend buying the book at a second hand book website.

[Ecurb]

I never thought about astrology one way or the other until I had a girlfriend for several years who was a famous astrologer. When I first met her, I read Plotinus (to impress her). I remember him writing that although it is obvious to everyone that the fates of humans can be read in the stars, it remains uncertain whether the stars CAUSE human fates, or are merely CORRELATED with them.

My friend scoffed at newspaper sun sign astrology. She had written a number of books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, including Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Russian. We didn't actually talk about astrology very much, because I was too naive about it to be able to say anything of interest to her, and because I didn't want my skepticism to ruin our relationship (and she didn't want her lack of skepticism to do the same).

She claimed that the mythic archetypes in an astrological chart can't actually predict the future, but they can help people understand themselves, just as (for example) literature can help us understand ourselves. In other words, astrology is enlightening, but not scientific.

Just recently she sent me a paper of hers about the antikythera device, touted as the first analog computer. It comprises 30+ geared wheels, that fit into a shoe-box-sized box, and, when set to a birth time by a crank, work out all the pertinent positions of the stars. It was discovered in 1901, by divers, in a ship that sunk in 150 B.C.E. (or so), but how it worked wasn't discovered until recently, when new archaeological techniques allowed archaeologists to read the instructions.

In addition to being an astrologer, she is a classical scholar who has translated original Greek documents. As a result, I once got to stay in the visiting faculty rooms at Brasenose College, Oxford University, while she did a series of lectures. You can't have more fun than that!

[prakssj4]

It is utter nonsense.

[Ecurb]

It is utter nonsense.

It seems to me this is an anti-intellectual comment. For several thousand years a great many very smart people have spent a great deal of time and effort on astrological research. The science of astronomy, for example, owes much to the discoveries of astrologers. Since this site is devoted to literature, we might expect that members would be interested in the Humanities -- art, literature, and religion -- the creative works of mankind. Of course some people might say, "Christianity is total nonsense", just like prakssj4 says astrology "is utter nonsense". However, whether Jesus rose from the dead or not, it would be silly and dismissive to say, "Christianity is utter nonsense". The mythic archetypes embodied in religion (including in astrology, which is 'religious' in that it involves supernatural statements) are enlightening, valuable, and intriguing -- whether the principles on which they are based are "true" or not. Many astrological commentators (including Plotinus) are rational, sensible people, whose commentaries are about as far from "utter nonsense" as possible. It is possible to be incorrect without being nonsensical.

[YesNo]

Ten years ago, I would have thought astrology was utter nonsense also. Today, I don't want to say anything is nonsense without trying it out. Even if it didn't work for me, I wouldn't claim it might not work for someone else.

Were I to try to come up with a theory that might justify planetary influences I would note the following:

1) The typical scientific reductions to quantum "particles", selfish genes and neurons coupled with chance doesn't explain enough. Astrology may be a way to understand some of the constraints on us that we don't currently recognize.

2) Most influences that science acknowledges can be expressed as field properties within space-time. That is, all influences are at a distance even though that distance might be very small. The influences that astrology talks about are also all at a distance so they might be expressed as field influences.

3) There are also non-local influences for entangled quantum reality. If one defined space-time as reality with only local (field) influences, non-local influences would be outside space-time. Astrology could be discussing those non-field influences.

I know that these anti-reductionist, field and non-local arguments will not likely persuade most people and they would not have persuaded me ten years ago, but at the moment they are a way for me to think outside the cultural constraints of my metaphysical box.