People is born in seasons, constellations and planets appear in seasons, and so ancient smart people made a connection.
Then the largest actor interested in destroying Astrology is the Catholic Church for reasons. The church also had wrong astronomical theories. Science evolved, but we inherited a dead horse to beat.
The reasons the Catholic Church did away with astrology can be explained in a one liner. Catholicism assumes a belief in free will, and the claimed predictive power of astrology contradicted this, and so was deemed blasphemous.
You are being downvoted, but it is completely true. This is going to be used in the gurusphere in the way Deepak Chopra abuses the language of quantum physics to justify quackery. While things like this are always interesting, part of me can't help be be depressed knowing it's going to go into the firehose of nonsense we're being sprayed by every day.
It's happening in this very thread in a few places already...
Mocking the thinking of others while literally engaging in soothsaying is rather ironic don't you think?
And yes, of course, I'm well aware you are able to cherry pick some silly quotes from Deepak to "prove" your point, and that I "should" "know what you meant" (let's ignore whether even you did, at the time you wrote the comment), but the never ending Motte and Bailey from you people is exhausting. Please try to broaden the scope of your knowledge, it may naturally reduce levels of hubris.
Conspiracy theories don't come from thinking one is smarter, but rather from a lack of trust. When somebody (or some entity) says something, how you respond to them is not only based on your perception of their knowledge, but also on your perception of the trustworthiness. It's somewhat of a tautology to say that as decline in trust of US institutions declines, lack of believing in what these institutions says also declines.
And trust in US institutions is not just randomly declining either. We just seem to have largely removed the social mores on lying and manipulation, so long as it can be used to push an agenda. If the powers that be want to reclaim public trust then there needs to be a much greater effort to increase transparency, honesty, hold open debate on all topics, and also hold groups accountable for misleading or lying to individuals. Instead we seem to be going rapidly in the exact opposite direction, and it's not difficult to predict the outcome.
Cycles exist on Earth. Cycles exist in astral bodies. If an astral cycle aligns with some earth cycle, you can legitimately use the astral cycle to track the earth cycle. There is nothing wrong with doing this, it’s a useful tool.
The problem came when people confused correlation with causation. There’s also some spurious correlations used as well as some scale extrapolation issues.
But what was probably the root mechanism is sound. That is why ancients seem so weirdly obsessed with the stars, it actually works in some cases (non causally of course).
Let's say for example that Bill incorrectly believes his wife and his friend Steve are having an affair and he kills them both in a fit of rage - did Bill's belief play any role in the causality underlying the death of the two humans?
Didn't need to. I just went to the website of the organization that sponsored the lecture and saw the quackery I expected.
> "The Meru Project has discovered an extraordinary and unexpected geometric metaphor in the letter-sequence of the Hebrew text of Genesis that underlies and is held in common by the spiritual traditions of the ancient world. This metaphor models embryonic growth and self-organization. It applies to all whole systems, including those as seemingly diverse as meditational practices and the mathematics fundamental to physics and cosmology...Meru Project findings demonstrate that the relationship between physical theory and consciousness, expressed in explicit geometric metaphor, was understood and developed several thousand years ago."
This is how Stan starts the lecture. His research is the exact opposite of quackery.
> No one should believe what I’m saying. It’s not that I’m telling you anything that isn’t so it’s just that you really need to be skeptical about this sort of thing. This is work in progress; it’s an honest research. I speak quickly and I may say “is” when I mean, based on the models and based on the references, it is my best conjecture that this “is”. So I’m not saying “absolute truth” when I say “is”, I’m just trying to fit things into a short time period.
> This is very controversial materiel because of, in the words of a friendly scholar, “It cannot be so”. And what he means is that if “it is so” then there is a lot of readjustment to be made. And I try to explain to people that this really doesn’t say anything like, “I’m right and you all are all wrong.” It says rather that this is deeper level integrates a whole range of material. And it demonstrates that what the scholars have been saying and what the religious people have been saying, and what the different religious people have been saying; they’re all right, but in their own context and if you go deeper you find something more common.
So the lecture starts with quackery as well. At no point does he say that he is using the scientific method to verify any claims. Instead, he says that the religious people and scholars are right because of magic.
Then the largest actor interested in destroying Astrology is the Catholic Church for reasons. The church also had wrong astronomical theories. Science evolved, but we inherited a dead horse to beat.