I know this person who's intelligent and well-educated. Let's call him John. Whenever I have the chance I enjoy having a quick chat with him. (He has a degree in theology. I don't understand how you can get a degree in theology but not in comics. Don't they both deal with imaginary, make-believe characters with superpowers? I'm outraged both as an atheist and as a comics nerd.)
Perhaps surprisingly he's very much into astrology. To be fair he doesn't think that astrology can predict the future. He doesn't check the horoscope on a daily basis. (I used to do that when I was young.) But he does think that your birthday will determine your personality.
When we first started talking to each other he asked me what my star sign was. I told him I was a Gemini. In hindsight that was a mistake, a missed opportunity. Every time I do or say something, anything, he says "Ha, typical Gemini!" I should've told him I was a Taurus and then catch him out.
(That reminds me an old joke. This guy goes to the doctor. He stays in the doctor's office for some time, and when he comes out he has a confused, perplexed look on his face. So he walks back in and says "Excuse me, doctor, what was that thing you said earlier? Was it Capricorn?" And the doctor replies "No, I said cancer. Cancer!")
I like John. He's a good man, so I didn't want to antagonize him too much on astrology. On the other hand I don't want to lie or be condescending either, so when the subject came up I couldn't hide my skepticism.
He said that, while he recognized that there's no evidence to support astrology, he found it to be true on an empirical level (in other words, based on personal experience and observation) even though, by his own admission, he couldn't explain it. Of course that didn't convince me either.
James Randi (an outspoken skeptic who loves to expose all sorts of charlatans), when he was young he got a job as an astrologer in a newspaper, even though he thought it was nonsense. (I have no idea how he landed that job.)
He would just make stuff up, writing the horoscope with random forecasts, and he would still receive lots of letters from his readers congratulating him on how accurate his predictions were. People can rationalize anything. Like I said earlier, I bet that if I had told John that I was a Taurus, he would be punctuating our conversations with "Ha, typical Taurus!".
Astrology has been around for a long, long time. Like religion, it has proven to be incredibly resilient. (I suppose that things like astrology, clairvoyance and tarot cards reading are perhaps less pernicious than religion. Religion claims to know what is right and what is wrong, and that inevitably creates all sorts of problems, whereas I'm guessing that most people that go to a psychic or a card reader probably just want to find out if they're gonna get laid anytime soon, and who can blame them for that?)
In the late 1700s, at the height of the Enlightenment, some people thought that, by the 21st century (in fact much earlier than that), both religion and astrology would've been long gone. That didn't happen. Will it ever happen? I don't know, but I'm not really bothered either way, to be honest. And besides it doesn't matter, it's a moot point.
If everything goes well, best case scenario, I'm only going to be around for another thirty or forty years. Fifty tops. I doubt things will change much in such a short period of time. I'm just glad that, by pure chance, I was born at a time when I can openly ridicule these things without someone setting me on fire. And that's not something to be sniffed at.
(I am in absolute awe of those very few atheists that did exist in medieval times, when scientific knowledge was very primitive, superstition was rampant, conformity was the norm, and education was monopolized by the church. While I'd like to believe that I would've still been an atheist if I was born in the year 1250, I can't be 100% sure that I would've been. I bow in admiration to those people.)
