Astrology is The Forer Effect in action

I’m sure this topic is quite hard to swallow for a lot of people. Nevertheless the truth must be told and charlatans must be exposed!

“Some of the astrologers believe that each person has a predestined life and their life can be reflected.”

…And what empirical, repeatable, peer-reviewed testing have they done to prove their theory? Sorry, I need a little more evidence something will work before I spend my time and money on it.

Thanks for creating the audio version. It’s quite kool! ;-)

Wow! That’s fantastic! It’ll make things a lot more interesting…

LOL! ;-D

Perhaps the correct way to address the existence or non existence of astrology may be more like trying to find it, whatever it may be, rather than trying to burn it at the stake….:)

I have observed that astrology comes from our artistic creative side: it is irrational, it is art and poetry, not science. So lets study it as one studies and art. Lets learn to critique its products, and not simply seek to exterminate it.

How much does the art of birth charts have in common with some other art like painting. Let test the idea that *perhaps* humans are clever enough to produce two different arts which are each aimed at a common goal–the illumination of the idea of unique selfhood ( or Self-hood) by way of abstract symbolisms.

I test the notion by finding abstract graphic artists who apparently unintentionally project the pattern of their birth chart in their works of self-portraiture. Here’s one example (below) that I found where I search the web for abstract artists with published birth dates.

The abstract self portrait:
http://pedantus.free.fr/Ligal_E_SelfRegeneration.gif

I set up a birth chart for her provided date, and use twelve noon as the birth time …the time of course is not known to me, the experimenter. After noting where artistic similarities occur between abstract symbolism and the ‘planetary’ symbolisms of the birth chart, I adjust the chart in search of a good fit birth time ‘guess’. To be real brief here; I ‘guessed 3:14 PM, emailed the artist requesting the correct time, and learned that she was born at 3:10 PM . I make overlay comparisons, so here it is:
http://pedantus.free.fr/Ligal_E_Fig.1a.gif

It is not astrology’s fault that so few people are individualistically talented as projectors of astrological Self symbols. However, schizophrenic talents like Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) do produce their symbolism in the form of metaphor and simile. So much so that I was able to find the actual birth date, May 22, 1942, by making an ‘astrology-based’ translation of the unknown individual’s published manifesto. And did so long before his own brother recognized the writing style and anti-social political sentiments.

I think to finally study astrology for what it is, some kind of poetic psychological art only incidentally involving totally unconscious, perhaps even mindless, planetary synchronizations is way over due.

The are no apophenic knee-jerk reactions in this study of ‘ horoscopic expression’ … the time of day and various symbol positions are not arbitrarily assigned…there is and objective, falsifiable, empiracal phenomenon here which Randy, et. al., simply *refuse* to see. Adverse peptic reations here are due to some emotional problem passed off as Skepticism, and not, Reason at work. Advocacy can be taken way to far– skeptical talking points and simple rhetoric suddenly becomes science. Astrology understands the poetry here, and well understands the specific poetry of each individual speaker…be he rational or not, it is all about the unity and diversity of our many human arts and our wide ranging (mis-?) perceptions….:)

dyslexic best wishes,

Roger L. Satterlee
Elmira, NY

1) Special Pleading logical fallacy.
2) Fallacy of inconsistency “It’s an art, cant be studied like a science…” and “it makes empirical, testable predictions…”

Many more, but those are the good ones. Sorry dude, your meaningless babble is refuted by my basic logic skills.

I realize the many great and perhaps wholly unnecessary problems we suffer due to a near total lack of critical thinking skills across this pale blue dot, but we can only make it worse by thinking Science provides us with an exhaustive explanation of the various phenomena of human consciousness. I could not be more sympathetic to the skeptic’s desire to rid the world of ignorance. It is for this very purpose, I have but shared with you the experience I had while testing a hypothesis; i.e., given the date of a subject’s birth, can one discover the birth time of a complete stranger by looking for symbolisms in an abstract self-portrait which seems similar to symbols we find used in the art of astrology. Here I but compare two arts and make no scientific claim. What science could there actually be in it…none I suspect. The material at hand represents things that are ontic in nature–simply there, and have no explanatory value–no cuasal agents are implied. However, any refusal to address the issue of this amazing coincidence, the fact that it turns out I was only mistaken by 4 minutes, seems to be a very unresonable in itself. I am only saying that we need to remember how much we still do not know about the mind and its ‘artistic’ creative capacities. These very same creative urges are as important to scientific discovery as any other human endeavor. There does seem to be an innexplicable relationship between this abstract self-portrait and the so-called birth chart of the artist. I only wish to communicate that it seems wholly un-scientific to exclusively address the merely immagined motivation of the experiment, and further, to simply refuse to discuss such usual matters as hypothesis formation, methods, proceedures, observations, and so forth. It is also interesting to note that ‘astrologers’ have exactly the same response to this underlying Art hypothesis, and also negate the phenomena out of hand for they feel quite strongly that their ‘science’ is also being offended…:)
Perhaps the spirit of inquiry need not be quite as demonic as ignorance itself..:)

Rog