5 Comments

  1. I always rather liked Douglas Adams’s suprisingly generous take on it in Mostly Harmless:

    I know that astrology isn’t a science,’ said Gail. ‘Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis … The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the ditference it would make. Its just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a prece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important, It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do
    with people thinking about people.

  2. I choose to never buy a magazine or newspaper or subscribe to a website that includes astrology.

  3. You are wrong. Astrology has been proven to be correct when everyone born under the sign of Aquarius was run over and killed by a 32 ton truck yesterday …

    Oh, wait. That didn’t happen.

    As you were.

  4. In a Dilbert cartoon his dog said, “If you are dumb enough to believe that the stars influence our lives you are probably better off listening to an astrologer than making your own decisions.”

  5. It’s difficult to come up with any sort of rationale for your birth date and time to affect your future but your birth date could affect your character. E.g. a baby born in Spring. say March or April, will spend his important developmental first few months of life in the summer, whereas a baby born in September or October spends his first months in the winter. Also, the conditions experienced by his pregnant mother could affect his development.

    For what it’s worth, my birthday is 19th February. Some generalised horoscopes say that’s Aquarius, some say Pisces. I never felt comfortable with being Aquarius, Pisces seemed a better fit to my character. I later found out that for my birth year, 19th February is indeed Pisces. Obviously that’s just one data point, more research is needed. Please send me lots of money and I’ll start the research right away. 🙂

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