Astrology

When I first met my first wife she introduced me to one of the world's biggest cons. Astrology.

What a great steaming pile of fetid dingo shit that is. Most astrologers divide the sky into 12 near equal portions of 31 days The position of the sun at the time of your birth determines your 'sign''. Spot the mistake yet? There are two!

The first is that constellations are not perfectly arranged in exactly 12 equal pieces, Scorpio for example, hosts the sun for only a week and Pisces for 38 days. So there should be five times as many Pisceans as Scorpios.

The second is that they have missed an entire constellation! Ophiuchus lies between Scorpio and Sagittarius. Not a word about this constellation appears in any discussion of sun signs. The next bit of bullshit is the tables they use. They worked well for Plutarch but the planets (including the Earth, but not Mercury - a different tale hangs from that phenomenon) experience precession. Our orbits are not circular but an oval shape, and the oval shifts a bit back with every orbit (year). Consequently, the stars appear in a slightly different area of the sky, and the position of the sun in relation to those (the basis of all 'tropical astrology' - by far the most popular version) is different now to what it was even last year. Over thousands of years the difference is dramatic. In fact it takes around 26,000 years to come back to its start point. Thus those complicated charts they wave around are like a broken clock, right twice a day, except we need millennia before they get it right again.

Finally, the idea that the stars can influence our behaviour, earthquakes and romance strikes me as the most absurd. Einstein showed us that nothing can travel faster than light, not even information. So for the stars to be influencing little Timmy from his birth moment, they would have to have predicted his birth hundreds of years ago (often thousands) and sent their little influencing rays then. Never mind that no 'influencing rays' have ever been found and EVERY time astrology has been tested using our greatest discovery, the Scientific Method, it has failed.

Basically as I said to the woman in the newsstand, "It's quite simple to tell the difference, Astronomy is a science, Astrology a con." She glared at me and I smiled back at her and asked "Would you care to debate the matter?" All I got was more silent glaring. When I accepted this crap wholesale it was as if I had some sort of distorting spectacles that changed how I saw everything. I'd predict people's sign and counted the hits and never the misses. I read Linda Goodman's Sun Sign - twice and confidently wandered around thinking I had the drum on everything. I was so bloody wrong, it is embarrassing to reflect upon it.

Thank Hitchens for science!