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Michael's avatar

Come in, handsome woman.

Good to know it's not just us men who are so easily suckered.

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Rogier van Vlissingen's avatar

The question about believing in astrology is absurd. Most people think the question means do the planets and the stars influence my life, and that is an absurd belief indeed. Do I believe a clock tells time? If I can read, and it is properly synched up, it can tell me the time in a serviceable manner for my timezone. But the clock does not make the time.

The solar system is a system, and the positions of the planets relative to the background tell me something about the state of the system. Now, are we able to deduce something about what those conditions mean in our lives? How useful is our interpretation? Some people are better at it than others. Most of the people who don't 'believe' in astrology have no idea what it even is, and evidently they have never met a good astrologer. My father was a psychiatrist, and on a few occasions he was stumped with a patient, and he had an astrologer friend who from time to time did very good charts for a few of his patients, and he accepted the fact that this was sometimes an avenue to opening up a course of therapy with a patient. He did that maybe once or twice a year, if a patient was open to it. Astrology would not have survived if there was not something to it... but it is not what most people think it is and there are definitely good astrologers and bad ones.

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