The Strategic Retreat

Astrology is a lie

botanic garden gates

I hate astrology. There are few things I hate more. That may seem a bit odd and petty but I mainly hate things that impact my life directly. I mean, I also hate slavery, and hunger and animal abuse but those things don’t pop up at social gatherings and call me “close minded”. In a real sense, I hate things that impact me more than things that don’t. It’s not that I think those things are more important in an overall sense but I’m this clothed hairless-monkey water monster that lives in California. I’m not some theoretical presence. In the real world, in my day to day, astrology comes up; most other things I hate do not.

It’s not just that astrology is a lie. It’s that otherwise intelligent people believe in it. It’s that the reasons people believe in it are so clearly false. It’s that people force me into conversation about it. It’s that their beliefs creep into my world and I have to defend reality from craziness. The person centered in reality should not have to be the one on the defensive. But there is should and there is is and people who crazily believe in astrology aren’t going to go away. Because of this I’m going to write up the reasons why astrology is definitely false so I can just point a person to this post next time they berate me for not embracing the “Saturn Shift” as fact. As this undoubtedly will actually happen, I may update this to add additional reasons or expand current reasons later on.

If Astrology once had any validity, and that’s a big if, it doesn’t now. Here’s how I see a past valid version of astrology before it was perverted and warped to the current state of Astrology belief. Once upon a time there was a group of people living in a small geographical location. They would tell the equivalent of months by the stars. This area had different seasons. Children born in certain months would be born in the cold or rain, in other months; born into the heat. Some would be born into months of plenty, some in months of scarcity. Some would begin walking as soon as possible, some held back due to it being too cold or rainy to frolic. Based on when a kid was born he/she would have a slightly different upbringing. People didn’t have Gregorian calendars back then, so they determined when the child was born by the stars. By constellations rather than specific dates. Right or wrong, and nearly certainly inexact, people believed that children born at different times would have different personality characteristics. Due to the above weather variables they probably did have different characteristics. Whether they were as prevalent as some people now believe or if they were even the correct characteristics is unknown, but unlikely. But the point is; Astrology, at one point in time, had a sliver of a basis in reality. People born in conditions that change cyclically could be expected to have some common traits with people born in the same cycle but different years. That sliver of reality is no longer valid and here’s why:

Geographical difference

I was born in L.A., not Mesopotamia or China. L.A. has a different climate, and different seasons, than where Astrology originated. The seasonal change is entirely different and can’t be accurately aligned with the seasons when and where Astrology originated. People born outside of where this originated can’t be assumed to have the same traits. Rain, heat, snow, drought and temperature variance all change greatly based on where you are in the world. It can not be expected that a child born to Native Inuits would have the same weather based childhood as a Singaporean. The difference in weather has a real impact on the child and the weather affects upon children born in the same month in Babylon 4,000 years ago can’t be thought to correspond. Also, if you’re born in the southern hemisphere you have a completely separate group of stars, which makes the whole star based belief system a bit wonky.

Stars don’t affect the earth in a meaningful way

The gravitational effect of stars is about the same as the gravitational effect exerted upon you by your wallet on your dresser, practically nothing. This can not have a significant impact on your personality. The light of the stars is nearly meaningless in today’s world due to light pollution. Even if you can see the stars, the overall light from the stars will be the same regardless of the time of year, only the patterns shift. And if the pattern is significant, what about the people in the Southern Hemisphere who see different stars or people at different latitudes that see them from a different angle? There is no significant force exerted by the stars on people. They were merely a representation of seasons, which are widely inconsistent throughout the world. If there is an unknown force it would have to be not only incredibly powerful but amazingly exact. It would have to impact people in a drastically different way based on only 2 million miles difference in location of the earth(a bit more than 1 day of Earth’s orbit), millionths of fractions of a star’s distance from earth. It would also have to be undetectable by any known means.

The Earth has shifted

Over the past 4,000 years the Earth has tilted on its axis. If the stars had an actually affect on people by sky position this tilt would have changed that affect. Yet, nothing has been done to account for this. So, even if you believe the stars once held sway over people’s lives and personalities, that was the stars from 4,000 years ago and they would have a different affect than they do now. I mean, probably. If Astrology is actually based on star position and not “question mark”.

Exact demarcation of signs

Despite the stars shifting drastically astrological signs are fixed down to the day, unchanging. Apparently there is no fuzziness in signs, regardless of the fuzziness of measurements. The stars have traveled and shifted untold trillions of miles in the past 4,000 years, yet astrological signs are determined by time down to the minute. How can the stars have changed so much in relationship to the earth, have such an exacting effect and yet never change how they influence the lives of people based on their movement, the movement of the earth, their distance, their visibility or the different locations of people on the Earth?

No backing in science

If astrology was a thing that was true, even slightly, I’d have no problem with it. I don’t know how electricity works but I know it does work and I know it’s awesome. If there was any validity at all in astrology, I would not be writing this right now. The fact is, there is not. There has never been any scientific study that supports astrology but there have been plenty showing it’s bunk.

  • Where the stars are at when a person is born does not affect people globally. That is, even it affects people based on weather patterns, because those weather patterns aren’t universal nothing can be determined by somebody’s sign.

  • If the effect was based on the position of stars in the sky, since the Earth has tilted then the criteria for assigning signs should have changed.

  • If the stars exert an unknown force on us that force would have shifted radically over the past 4,000 years as stars have shifted by trillions of miles. Astrology doesn’t account for trillions of miles of shift in the stars but a 2 million mile movement by the earth around the sun can completely change one’s astrological sign and personality? That clearly can’t be right either.

  • If astrology is based on the visibility of the stars, the location of the stars, the closeness of the stars or the seasons of the earth; it is demonstrably false.

    If astrology was originally based on any of those, it’s a simple matter to show that the current interpretation of Astrology is wrong and needs to be updated. If, on the other hand, Astrology is not based on any of those things then I’m baffled at how people can incorporate the stars at all into the Astrology belief systems as the stars themselves would be entirely disconnected from said beliefs. The only conclusion is that either Astrology is in no way connected to stars or that Astrology is unequivocally a false belief system.

    What really gets me is that the same people who blindly believe what an intern wrote in an astrology column in a free paper judge others so harshly. It’s no more ridiculous to believe that dinosaurs never existed or believe that the sun revolves around the earth than to believe that not only do the stars control us but they control us in the exact way a few people wrote about, contrary to demonstrable science. If you’re going to believe in magic you really shouldn’t judge others who do the same. Believing in the supernatural, and believing in it the exact way it was written; that was proven to be corrupted, inexact and at some times completely fallacious is placing your faith in a tainted religion no better than any other tainted religion. You just happen to have a different book.

    If anyone has anything to add or any valid criticisms please chime in. I’d like to tighten this up over the next few months so I never have to have a conversation about Astrology again.

    About Jeff
