Yet nearly every advertisement I’ve ever seen for astrology is tailored for a female audience. New Age fairs always seem to draw far more women than they do men (and most of the men who do attend New Age fairs seem to be boyfriends just putting up with their girlfriends’ quirky New Age affinity). Untested herbal remedies, aromatherapy, and even good old-fashioned homeopathy are targeted at women much more than they are at men.
I think I’ll go sit in my pyramid-shaped orgone energy accumulator and munch on a mandrake root now.
I have never said I accepted astrology, assumption on your part.
No one can ever know how and what happened millions of years ago, your evidence consists of a few bones, and a lot of assumptions.
Hundreds out of the millions that go through the US school system every year is not very many.
Nevertheless I would bet that the % of admitted atheists in the US is smaller now than it was 40 years ago (1960s).
And I might remind you that it was the founding farthers’ wishes that enshrined the separation of church and state in your constitution. Remember that when your soldiers are fighting theocracies elsewhere in the world.
Why? Because the KJV isn’t in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin? Because the translation is 400 years old? Because the translators were a bunch of Anglicans? Because English-speaking Protestants have used it more than any other translation and so therefore it must “be” Protestant?
Because it’s not a direct translation of the Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic. Because the translation has a specific political intent to prop up the legitimacy of an unremarkable, long-dead British monarch. Because tinkering with God’s word tends to result in something that’s either a grievous heresy or irrelevant piffle. (Yeah, I know, the Bible’s history is a series of ham-handed rewrites for blatantly political ends, be it for Solomon, Constantine or whomever; this one was specifically intended as a spite to my tribe, though.)
To its believers, it’s the Holy Book. To its nonbelievers, it’s not even a Holy Book. You know how the Book of Mormon makes perfect sense to Mormons, but not so much to anybody else? Same thing.
Douglas Adams had a good way of explaining astrology. Something about, if you take a sheet of paper and sprinkle it with metal filings, they’re all over the place with no particular order. But if you then get a magnet and move it around under the paper, the metal follows it, now having order. Astrology is just another way of imposing (or attempting to impose) order on a chaotic universe. If you try to look at it all at the same time, all you see is a mess; you need some sort of filtering system, which is all astrology really is.
That doesn’t prove or disporve the scientific validty of astrology though, I just find it the best way of understanding the phenomenon and why it’s endured for so long.
Btw, this thread inspired me to start another on Chinese astrology, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
Yes, but that’s within the cultural bias of North America, where a man who told his buddies he was spending the weekend centering his aura instead of tuning his car would receive strange looks and ridicule, while getting his ass whipped with wet towels in the locker room.
Outside of the manly U.S. and the manly-but-polite Canada (and possibly the manly-but-inebriated Australia) belief in homeopathy and astrology and crap like that is commonplace for both genders.
The following comes from The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1996), pp. 278-280:
quote:
Conservatives do not recognize how much the nation has changed since the fifties in its religious attitudes. It may be that the religion of nominal Christians in the United States can no longer be described as traditional trinitarian Christian. The scholarly term for their belief is henotheism, the belief that all ethnic groups and cultures have, and should have, their own gods and rites. In Christian theology, this is the heresy of indifferentism. Robert Linder and Richard Pierard have described the evolution of American civil religion: “Its umbrella has changed from evangelical consensus to Protestantism-in-general, to Christianity-in-general, to the Judeo-Christian tradition in general, to deism-in-general.” The decline in belief in Christianity as the only true religion has been extraordinarily rapid in the United States. In a poll taken in 1924 in Muncie, Indiana, 94 percent of high school students agreed that “Christianity is the one true religion and all peoples should be converted to it.” By the late 1970s, merely 38 percent of respondents in a later poll in Muncie agreed that Christianity was the only true faith. Two-thirds of the respondents in a 1991 poll agreed that Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists “pray to the same God.”
This sentiment no doubt appals Christian and Jewish theologians. From the point of view of those concerned with national unity, however, it is an encouraging development. It lessens the chance that religious discord will produce civil strife. Of the policy of ancient Rome, Edward Gibbon wrote: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrates as equally useful.” In the United States, “Potomac piety” has been promulgated by statesmen taking the side of the magistrates, from George Washington, who thought that Christianity was useful in protecting “property,” that is, the rich minority, from attacks by populists, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who declared: “Our government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Tocqueville noted: “An American sees in religion the surest guarantee of the stability of the state and the safety of individuals . . . much the same may be said of the British.” Will Herberg noted that in the United States Christian and Jewish “denominations” are less religious institutions than instruments of social integration.
The new, semi-official American religion of indifferentist theism (there is one God and many equally true religions) does not solve the problem of a common ethic. On the contrary, it makes it all the more pressing. Indifferentism necessarily leads to a divorce between religion and ethics, for the simple reason that there is no single, authoritative generic-theist table of commandments. Fortunately, moral consensus does not require theological consensus. As the neoconservative scholar James Q. Wilson has pointed out, “Religion is for many a source of solace and for a few a means of redemption, but if everyday morality had depended on religious conviction, the human race would have destroyed itself eons ago.” Somehow Japanese classrooms manage to be orderly without a copy of the Ten Commandments on every classroom wall (a goal of American fundamentalists). Indeed, outside of North America, the most prosperous, least crime-ridden and most educated countries are the post-Protestant societies of Northern Europe, in which traditional Christianity is in serious long-term decline, and the highly secular Confucian societies of East Asia. Conversely, the parts of Europe and the Americas in which institutional Christianity has been strongest in recent centuries, the Catholic and Orthodox countries, have been characterized by poverty, tyranny, and political instability, which exist to an even greater degree in the Muslim world. The most religious part of the United States, the South, has long been the poorest, most violent, and most illiterate section of the country."