Now Zild, I totally respect your choice to take up astrology. I respect anyone who can play on the ignorance and naïvete of the general public for financial gain. The guy who sold the cutout of Boardwalk (or one of the other big winning pieces) from the game board and sold it for thousands of dollars to someone who thought it was really the winning game piece, the Swedish organization who, if you pay it a thousand dollars, will guarantee you have a boy as a child and will refund your money if you don't, John Edward, James Van Praagh, they're all amazing for being able to get thousands or millions of dollars just because people trust in the crap that they do.
I just don't want you to fall into the trap of actually believing that the locations of the planets when you were born have an affect on your everyday life. It happens to lots of people, and national embarassment is on the list of consequences if you fail.
Achau Nguyen, anyone?
On the other hand, if it is real and can be proven real under scientific observation,
there's a million dollars waiting for you to collect it.
You see, Zild, I'm a scientist and inherently a skeptic (although there is the occasional
reputable scientist who
embarasses the scientific method by not being skeptical). The fact is, though, that astrology is nothing but a pseudoscience. There is no valid basis for believing in astrology, and though you may think it works, that's only coincidence or cold reading or something else working.
Doing a reading on me may not be the best idea, ever. In a class of about sixty people, we all wrote down detailed information about our births and the professors sent them away to an astrologer. When we got them back a couple of months later we opened them up and rated them from 1-5 on the basis of how well they applied to us. About 90% of the class gave it a four or a five, while I was only one of about three to give it a one. What was the catch? We all had the exact same reading. Sure, our professors shamelessly stole it from a James Randi experiment, but they gave credit.
The only reason astrology isn't obsolete is because it isn't based on anything that could be made obsolete. If you think about it, it should, though. Astrology was around long before the outer planets were discovered, but current ones factor in Pluto and the like. What about the Kuiper Belt objects that are bigger than Pluto? What about the wobble of the Earth's axis? I was supposedly born under the constellation Scorpio. Will anyone born this November ninth be born under Scorpio? NO! Every twenty years the signs get off by an entire constellation! This should make every astrological prediction made before these discoveries wrong, but it doesn't. Also, modern readings don't take these things into account. There's just so much against it.
What about all the arguments for it? Well, Occam's Razor will slice off any word before it even exits the mouth of a true believer in astrology.
Sorry, Zild, but it's not real. Should that stop you? Of course not, but just be careful.
--Guido
http://andy.mikee385.com