AmeerikaUlePilvede wrote:Does anybody here believe in the zodiac? Where astronomy started? It seems a lot of people have started to forget about it. I'm a Leo myself and a lot of my friends have told me how I follow the description to a "T". However, when I've looked at it in-depth, its always confused me. Primarily because of my low amount of knowledge for this peticular subject. Any specialists in this area here?
Let's work out exactly what astrologers are claiming. Astrologers claim that whatever your "sign", the moons and planets and stars overhead will affect each person in a different way, now this raises a couple of logical problems. Let's really simplify this just to keep it super simple.
Let's say you get 12 people in a room, each born under a different astrological sign on the exact same day. Now, let's assume that we look at Jupiter's influence on the people we have in that room. How do astrologers claim jupiter will affect these twelve people? Well, they come in two camps.
Some astrologers believe that depending on when you were born, years ago, jupiter's "pull" on your will be different. That it will somehow affect your differently today. Why would a record of when you were born, or the location of a star or planet have such an affect on you years later? Another question to ask is, why would it affect only the person born on that day and not everyone who is alive at the time?
Others claim that it's effect on you is immediate, that it affects you based on the constellation or planet or star's position in the sky today. This calls into question again, why would the present position in the sky of any such object affect anyone in the room differently? Why should the pull of Jupiter's gravity affect you differently from me, just because of a date you happened to be born on decades ago (when I was alive anyway).
You can see how it doesn't make any sense at all fairly quickly.
The pull that they frequently refer to, wanting to sound scientific is Gravity. Problem is an apple sitting on your desk has more of a gravitational influence on you than jupiter, because of how far away jupiter is from you. Given all the massive objects around us all the time, you can see how completely irrelevant the gravitational pull of the planets, and much less the constellations of distant stars, would be.
Put simply, astrology developed at a time when people ascribed any events to the gods and to magic. It's a time when they burned witches when their crops didn't grow, their knowledge of how the universe worked was not exactly great. They did however notice that the temperature become warmer or colder depending on the position of the stars in the skies (the seasons) and they deduced correctly that there was some correlation between the moving stars across the skies and events on earth. Of course over time, not understanding WHY events on earth such as seasons (and droughts, and famines, and rain seasons) occured in correlation to the moving stars, they assumed the stars CAUSED these events. It's a natural progression to go from there to assume they must also influence people. Today of course we know better, yet the supernatural belief in astrology is still with us, a remnant from this earlier time.
As for you fitting the stereotype of a Leo to a tee, give this video a look. It documents an experiment conducted by famed magician and noted debunker James Randi who exposes these kinds of belief systems. He gives a class of students personalized horoscopes and then asks them to to rate how accurately the horoscopes describe them. On a scale of 1 to 5, about half rated their horoscope to be a 4, and the other half a 5 (the highest possible score). He then has them hand their horoscope to the person next to them, so that everyone now has the horoscope from someone else. Of course, they discovered that they all had the exact same horoscope.
The reason is that horoscopes tend to be very vague and generic information. You are pragmatic, loyal, shy, people don't realise how easily hurt you are, you like being with others but feel insecure, you like helping people but feel often others are not there for you. You are dependable and honest etc... All of these descriptions won't describe you, but most will because that's pretty much how we all see ourselves. When we read these kinds of vague generic descriptions we tend to see ourselves in them.
Another aspect to this is that we tend to forget the misses and remember the hits. Think of all the daily horoscopes you've read in the paper. How many said "you will experiance a change today" or some equally vague prediction. You will probably come home later that night and try with all your might to think of what change you experienced that fit the prediction, we've all done it at some point in our lives. Try as you might though, sometimes you just can't find something that truly fits, and you forget about it. But what if you read the paper today and it said you'd experiance a dramatic change, and you got hit by a car. Suddenly it dawns on you "My horoscope told me something dramatic would happen!!!!" and you WILL remember the amazing prediction that came true.
If you're interested in the randi horoscope video btw you can see it on youtube. Here's the link --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw&feature=related close(-)
Play Video
