[celerity]

A few aphorisms about Voja Antonić:

1. He was involved as a skeptic and wrote a well-received (among my friends at least) book debunking psychics and various kinds of nonsense. As a teenage boy in Serbia (in the late 90s?), I asked him to translate a portion of the book to English and put the translation on my website. He graciously allowed me to do so. Part of why I wanted to go through that massive effort was to convince an English-speaking girlfriend (whom I've met online!) that astrology is nonsense. You could say that relationship did not last long.

The book is now available as a free PDF on his website. [1] I don't know what happened to my website.

2. He moved to the US at 65 to work SV, and had some emotional things to say about the move. [2] It stuck with me.

(Both links are in Serbian.)

[1]: http://www.voja.rs/dpdl.htm

[2]: https://noizz.rs/intervju/voja-antonic-za-noizz-o-odlasku-u-...

[black_puppydog]

Too bad, I'd have loved to read this astrology debunking. And to forward it to a friend or two :P

You sure you don't still have a copy of it somewhere? 0:-)

[dragandj]

You can use the famous Carl Sagan book The Demon Haunting World instead. Voja's book was inspired by it and covers the same topics in similar manner.

[kencausey]

Slight correction: _The Demon-Haunted World_, Sagan, 1995.

[acqq]

Luckily we have today online translate services. I've copied the first 2 pages from the "Astrology" chapter from the linked PDF of the book to give you an idea how the automatic translation looks like:

"In order to understand astrology well, it is necessary to know it from the very roots. It originated in ancient Babylon, around 1000 BC, although some historians claim that astrology was conceived by the Sumerians, a whole millennium earlier. The precondition for the existence of large cities was well-developed agriculture, and this required knowledge of a precise calendar, as agricultural who had to know when to start sowing and how to adapt all agricultural work to the seasons. Establishing an accurate calendar is not it was possible without a good knowledge of mathematics and constant astronomy observations, and these jobs were most suitable for priests (the picture shows a stone on which is a record of the movement of the Moon, found in Mesopotamia). Thus the first astronomers were clergy, and it is logical that celestial bodies, which they discovered, were named after the then Babylonian gods. We we still use those names, actually theirs Roman translations: Mars instead of Nergal, Venus instead of Ishtar, Jupiter instead of Marduk and so on further.

Here we come to the first paradox which is an integral part of astrology: although the names of the gods were assigned to the planets in the random order in which they were discovered, the meaning and the significance that each particular planet carries with it bears is firmly attached to the role of the god by whom it is got its name, and it has remained unchanged to this day. For example, Nergal (Mars) is the god of war, so the summers that began with a stronger the radiance of the planet Nergal in the sky was immediately women as particularly suitable for military campaigns, and the springs in which the splendor of Ishtar (Venus, the goddess of love) was emphasized, were destined to be concluded marriages.

Same as for the planets, and for the stellar constellations the rule was that people born in a certain sign of the zodiac were attributed traits derived from the name of the sign. In the Babylonians, the number of characters that consisted of constellations initially changing between 6 and 18, but stabilized at about 600 BC 12. Soon the first horoscopes appeared: the oldest known dates from April 29, 410 BC. By the way, the division of the zodiac into 12 signs is not even today valid worldwide - Chinese and Indian horoscopes have 28, and Toltec cultures (in Central America) 20 characters. However, he respects all these horoscopes is the principle that the characteristics of people born in someone character directly depends on the name of that character. The oldest surviving critique of astrology was written by Cicero in 44 BC new era. His philosophical skepticism could not relate human characteristics to astronomical parameters at birth. He states that he would it would be more logical to establish the influence of meteorological conditions on the child at the time of birth, but not to notice any connection there either. The Greeks learned about astrology when they conquered Babylon in the fourth century BC, and the Romans took it from the Greeks. Before the end of the twelfth century ideas were taken over by northern Europe, so astrology soon entered the then school system. Around the seventeenth century, the sudden rise of science (primarily astronomy) caused the expulsion of astrology from European universities, so thus we come to another great paradox: its “golden age” astrology not experienced during the Middle Ages, when people were deeply religious and knowledge was transmitted mainly orally, but only since 1930, when British astrologer Naylor (R. H. Naylor) received an entertaining column in the daily newspaper in which he introduces an innovation: the horoscope! The interest of the audience in reading the fate was such that in record time all the papers got theirs horoscopes, and astrology experts sprouted like mushrooms afterwards rain. Today, for example, 96% of people in Europe know in which sign they were born, and only 34% know their blood type."