Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

I took an interest in Astrology, particularity the zodiac. However I am aware that the practice is usually seen as new age psudoscience, a method of divination or some other form of bullshit. I just want to know what you think of Astrology, its relationship to Astronomy, and do you think it is legitimate or objective in anyway.

On a side note, This is "Serous Debate" not "lonely neckbeard dating service". I will not see asking for other people signs for the purpose of dating that user does not contribute to this discussion

Astrology is nothing more than a thousands-of-years old anti-scientific superstition that describes the Cosmos as a puppet master, and you as nothing more than a mindless puppet. Astronomy, on the other hand, is an always up-to-date science that doesn't insult your intelligence, studies the Universe as it is, and teaches you to be humble with your size and position but proud for your stellar origins, since we're all star stuff, children of both Earth and the Cosmos. As about the "always accurate" predictions of the astrologers, they're so vague that can describe a huge variety of persons and situations.

I think that Carl Sagan can tell more about it even better than me.

Astrology is an interesting subject when you view it from a historical point of view – that is, how it affected the ancient world and modern day astronomy as we know it.

Present day astrology, however, is a load of trash. It's a bunch of bibble-babble that people (note: rubes) take to heart because of how vague it is. "Hey you know, it's extremely vague, so it might happen, right?

Like, today your horoscope will say you'll find true love, and tomorrow it will say you'll experience a heart-breaking moment. It's the equivalent of palm-reading.

Astrology from the perspective as a "scientific" tool to predict the future is nothing more than pseudoscience.

However, astrology is a lot more than that. What I find interesting about astrology is that it's a system that is capable of producing many unique sets of character traits that have the same number of predefined relationships as any other set of traits produced by the same system.

The best way to look at it is this way – most people know what a "sun sign" is, but you can also have signs in your moon, planets and even other celestial bodies. While a sun sign will rotate approximately every month, other signs will rotate at different rates due to the different relative position and orbit of that celestial object in comparison to Earth.

What this means is that while you may be an Aries, you may also have other signs as well. And all of these different celestial objects represents a different property of your life. However, the interactions between the values of all of these properties are already predetermined. For example, signs that are 3 signs away have negative interactions (so Aries and Cancer/Capricorn) while signs that are 2 away have positive interactions (Aries and Aquarius/Gemini). There are many other relationships defined in fairly easy to understand functions.

This makes astrology a great character building system, because you can simply feed it a seed (or a point in time rather), and gather the signs (the values of various properties) based on the location of the planets (or rather, the function that transforms the seed into one of twelve values). These values already have relationships built in based on the geometric properties of the zodiac, which is where the so-called predictive power comes from in astrology.

While this won't work at all in real life, it IS useful for creating completely unique characters with an equal amount of relationships between other properties. There are literally billions of possible combinations of these values, allowing for an extremely wide amount of characteristics combined into one – and from those characteristics we can easily predict how one set of values will interact with another.

So in short, I honestly find astrology very interesting, but not for its traditional use, but rather observing how it functions as a character building model.

I pretty much feel the same way, Astrology can be handy as a character building tool, and as a motif and storytelling but its RL applications are rather tenuous.

Astrology has no basis in reality as they presume that celestial bodies have some kind of influence on your own personal character or future outcome. Basic studies have disproven any kind of force coming from the other planets that could possibly have such an effect

It is interesting to look at from a historical point of view. But that's all it is and all it should be, in my opinion. I don't think modern people should orient their lives around it

If you really want to get into Astrology, you should research the trolls from Homestuck, how the zodiac signs were applied in Greek and Mesopotamian religions, research various kinds of zodiac calendars because there's more than one such as the Vedic and the Western as well as the different zodiacs like the Chinese or Hindu. Also, some people go as far as believing in the meanings behind all 48 signs in the sky. Here is a picture of the order for all the signs in the sky.

Original image from Deviant art here: http://epycwyn.deviantart.com/art/As-troll-ogy-project-preview-339560212

I wouldn't look at it as 100% fact, but it usually works well for me with the whole chart done (instead of the basic Sun sign). Also, it's pretty fun/interesting.

Interesting. I'll keep that in mind. BTW this is sorta off topic, but where did you find the signs, were they invented by Andre Hussie?

The link above the image gives the information for the image and on who made the image. I am unsure where the symbols originate from, but they are commonly used on the internet for the 48 signs of the zodiac and are not made by Andrew Hussie. Here is a map of what areas of the sky each one takes up.

This is a link to the page where I got that image from: http://tentacletherapissedoff.tumblr.com/post/89751582432/sqbr-a-map-of-the-night-sky-divided-into

Here is also a list of all the constellation signs with a name for each of them given.

http://www.suberic.net/~dmm/astro/constellations.html

It's fine, so long as you recognize that it's stupid fun and only stupid fun. Take it beyond that, and you get crazy.

Astrology is religious for some. To insinuate it's only stupid fun not to be taken further than that, insinuates taking any religious doctrine not rooted in logic is also stupid fun not to be taken further than that.

…
…
…and?

I certainly find it an interesting subject, and I like seeing how other people interpret it.

Personally, I don't find myself ruled by my own astrological sign, but rather see it as a sort of guidance to the kind of person I want to be. My personal sign (libra) signifies peace, balance, and harmony, and I have always strongly identified with these traits. Could I easily ignore these traits and take on the traits of, say, a gemini? Sure. Does everyone born between September 24th and October 20th have these traits? Most likely not.

I agree with what Epyc Wyn said, some people take Astrology to a religious or spiritual level. Some people have had astrology be a strong part of their family for generations. I have some friends that are like that, and to say people that take astrology beyond "stupid fun" are idiots or crazy is just disrespectful. Nobody is forcing you to believe the stuff, just chill out.

I never believed in Astrology, not even the fun side. It's always been too vague for me to get into. I prefer the MBTI for fun. I didn't know there have been academic psychometric papers based on astrology (this one about how most serial killers are born on November) but they do exist, and it goes to show that some people take Astrology kinda seriously on the scientific side.

You can't really compare astrology to modern religion, because astrology is inherently based on assumptions that have been scientifically disproven. You can be Christian and not believe that the world is 3,000 years old, because the the biblical creation story is not the central tenet of Christianity. Astrology, however, is based entirely on the idea that humans can be directly affected by constellations, which is complete nonsense.