I was just flipping channels and came across a televangelist named Paul Begley. I occasionally will watch these guys because some of them are actually really entertaining, but this guy wasn’t. However, the subject matter of his sermon astonished me. He was talking about all this astrological shit, Leo and Taurus and everything, and how the moon and Mercury and Saturn and Neptune were aligned in a certain way, according to a Biblical prophecy (something in Revelations.) I didn’t realize that the kind of Christians who are televangelists, buy into astrology at all. I would think the would reject it as black magic or pagan superstition.
Is this a common thing among evangelical Christians, or is this one guy just an odball?
Man who believes in one form of ancient mystical mumbo-jumbo, believes in another. Who would have guessed?
Basically, religious fundies will grab onto anything that could be twisted to back up their beliefs. If Mickey Mouse said ‘Remember when there was all that water lying around?’, they’d grab that as confirmation of Noah’s flood.
I had never heard of him, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. He gets a mention in the article on the “Nibiru cataclysm,” which I also had never heard of; the article identifies him as a “YouTube conspiracy theorist and pastor at the Community Gospel Baptist Church in Knox, Indiana.” From what I see in that article, the kind of thing that Begley would have been talking about is not just garden-variety astrology, but a peculiar form of nutty conspiracy theory.
I know of no mainstream branch of Christianity that endorses either this stuff or any other form of astrology, though it doesn’t surprise me that certain individuals might buy into it. From the Wikipedia article:
I’d feel more confident about how to interpret that result if control groups had been given the same questions but with astronomy or horoscopes in place of astrology. Many in this ilk conflate the terms; they might have thought they were taking a stand against science, but would have embraced belief in “horoscopes.”
If I’m interpreting the linked article correctly, it was describing a survey of Evangelical leaders, specifically “participants in the Third Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization,” whatever that is.
In that case, I’m fairly inclined to trust that they know the difference between astrology and astronomy. But the numbers might well be different if they had surveyed random evangelical laypeople.
You’re right. I misread that article as referring to all evangelicals, whereas it actually refers to evangelical leaders. The leaders are people who’ve seriously studied the doctrines that they are advocating. What most evangelicals believe is harder to say because they often don’t even know much about evangelical Christian doctrines. A lot of people in the U.S. at least call themselves evangelical Christians despite the fact that they seldom go to church. Some don’t go to church at all anymore. Some go to church regularly but don’t make any attempt to understand what’s said in sermons. So it’s certainly possible that there are a fair amount of people who call themselves evangelicals but who also at least vaguely believe in astrology.
There is a subset of fundamentalists that end up grasping at anything that can be twisted to support their particular worldview.
The first sermon I heard at one church I attended was by a particularly fundamentalist member, who ended up trying to invoke Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision to link in to the book of Joshua (the sun standing still). I’m pretty sure the christian Nibiru theorists are mining from the same seam of woo (with the realization that they cannot pull Mars and Venus into their cosmological disruption), and tossing anything else they can find - even it it includes astrological terminology from a practice that they also profoundly reject as a form of divination.
I did stay at that church for many years, as the vicar and the majority of the congregation were my sort of generally liberal charismatic anglicans, and I called out the fundamentalists (there were a few) on their creationism as often as they let me debate them. In the end, we mostly stayed friends.
Don’t discount the biblical aspect; if anything is even hinted at in the Bible, fundamentalists feel duty bound to pretend they believe it, no matter what, even if it directly contradicts something on the previous page.
Remember this – The Three Kings who followed the star are also astrologers. It was the definition, (at the time, and for a while afterward,) of a smart™ person – someone who could read charts, do math, and were part of the cabal of the learned people. Surely they know something and if you don’t, you can’t do much worse than follow their lead. So obviously, Christ is the Messiah. I mean really, how much more obvious does God have to make it for you? :rolleyes:
As was said, keep hitting people with random evidence until something sticks is the game plan.
Hey listen, consider astrologers in the newspaper. Those people are *syndicated * and they’re writers, for a respected paper. Who’s qualified to give you their opinion: them, or some guy who posts online, and doesn’t even own his own blog?
Here’s a list of “38” Biblical references to astrology. It’s very slim pickings. A lot of them don’t refer to astrology at all. And almost all of those that do give it in a negative context.
One “bigger picture” about Judeo-Christian beliefs and astrology that some support are the many references suggesting a Biblical tie-in to astrological ages. The ones of note:
Age of Taurus c4000-2000 BC. The Bull.
Age of Aries c2000-1 BC. The Ram.
Age of Pisces c 1AD-2000 AD. The Fish.
Age of Aquarius c2000-4000AD. The Water Carrier.
The Bible views Bull/Calf worship negatively. Note esp. the episode with the Golden Calf, Aaron, etc. It seems to be considered an old, out-dated belief that needed to be exterminated during the 2nd millennium BC.
Lots of metaphorical references to sheep/lambs/etc. Esp. once Jesus shows up. The death of Jesus as the metaphorical death of the Age of the Ram is quite noticeable.
The first era of Christianity contains many, many references to fish. “Fisher of men.” down to the Jesus Fish.
But you really have to stretch things to find references in the Bible to Jesus returning (?) as a water carrier, etc.
I think the Biblical writers were well aware of astrological beliefs but didn’t view it as something one should “practice”. Using some things as symbolism might be okay, but don’t go divining anything.
It does seem odd to most people today how the Biblical people managed to say A is okay but B is bad when to us A and B are basically the same thing. Modern categorical thinking just wasn’t their thing, apparently.