101–110 of 972 posts
"Like others who ascribe to astrology, she is a firm believer that celestial objects have a direct effect on human life."
It's either supposed to be 'subscribe' or there's a whole word missing.
There are epigenetic markers which can identify the season or perhaps even month you were born. If you might think there is a link between personality and birth order and that perhaps metaphor is useful in storytelling or group dynamics … then one could loosely link these concepts together and consider it more than something like a party trick.
If there are such markers, the flaw in astrology is not taking into account the hemisphere. Someone born in July would be born in summer in the northern hemisphere but winter in the south, so they can't possibly have been exposed to the same environmental factors growing up.
My girlfriend is in the middle of her PhD program and is very intelligent but she's really into this stuff. She makes comments about it in public and I cringe. But the worst part is that half my female friends and all my gay friends love astrology. It's very weird.
> half my female friends and all my gay friends love astrology That's about exactly my experience. Half my female friends (and about as many on dating platforms), and about three in four of my gay friends. Not a single straight guy ever talks to me about star signs.
The number of people in my life who have recently taken to astrology and started buying "healing" crystals is frankly disheartening. You try to argue with them they just call you toxic. I suspect it's a social virus.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to support this idea because it goes against my worldview as an atheist from a very conservative society. I grew up on Hitchens and Dawkins. But the YouGov poll [1] that the WaPo article is based seems to support this idea: 30% of Agnostics answered yes to the following question: "Do you believe in astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets influence people’s lives?" [1]: https://today.youg…
Dawkins [1] and Hitchens’ works on religion are pop-science/culture books, not serious academic studies. Virtually no scholars in philosophy, religious studies, etc. agree with the narratives they present. Instead, I would read Taylor, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution , and maybe Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. 1. His non-biological work, that is.
It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before.
Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.
I always love getting my tarot cards read. Do I believe it has special knowledge of the universe? Absolutely not. Does it get my thinking creatively and critically about the personal story that I have with my self? Yes. And that has some value.
I know they are not real, but by focusing on my own cognitive biases and wishes I can extract more information about my subconscious mind and potentially solve my problems.
The number of people in my life who have recently taken to astrology and started buying "healing" crystals is frankly disheartening. You try to argue with them they just call you toxic. I suspect it's a social virus.
People have flocked to astrology for the last couple thousand years. The best scams are proven scams.
But convincing a believer is like trying to explain to a die-hard flat-earther that the world is roughly spherical.