From: salyavin808 <[email protected]> This is really the problem. If we had never heard of astrology and you were to propose it as a scientifically credible system now, what would the evidence look like? Would you say that everything we know about psychology is wrong and all psychosocial phenomenon are better explained by the movement of planets against an arbitrary background? Bingo! This is really it.
I bailed from the TMO long before it embarrassed itself by trying to sell its cultist-followers the idea that astrology was a science. If I had still been around at that point, I would have laughed in Maharishi's face and told him the same things I have been posting here, that it's a pseudoscience that appeals only to weak-minded people and that neither he nor anyone else is ever likely to prove that it "works." But other people were still TBs, and thus bought into it without ever putting their minds and their discrimination in gear. Some of them actually went out and spent years trying to become Jyotishi themselves. Therefore, *they are heavily invested in the past*. It's harder for them to allow even the *concept* that it's all bullshit into their minds, because they invested so much of their time, energy, money, and above all ego in identifying with astrology. As you suggest above, if someone were to propose something as ludicrous as astrology here on FFL today, something they *hadn't* invested in for decades, they'd probably be as rationally skeptical as anyone else. But they simply can't "go there" with astrology/jyotish because they can't accept even for moment that they might have been W...w...w...wrong, and taken in by a pseudoscience that pandered to their egos and those egos' need to believe that they somehow could predict the future and "explain" the past and the present. As you may have noticed, Sal, I don't get involved with arguing with such people, just as I don't get involved with theists who try to convert others to their beliefs or political crackpots who try to convert others to their conspiracy theories. There is just too much ego there for me to want to go anywhere near it. The part I like about science in its ideal form is its willingness to *throw away* old theories the moment they are proved inadequate. REAL scientists can do that. Faux scientists can't. They're more like the astrologers and the theists and the people who believe that humans never walked on the moon -- *committed*. At some point in their lives they *settled*. They decided that the things they were told to believe were *right*, and having made that decision, their egos became so identified with that belief that at this point it is literally *impossible* for them to step back and question the beliefs themselves. The only thing they can do is cling to the stuff they were told and try to demonize or silence those who challenge it. In other words, arguing with an astrologer is like arguing with a pig. It never accomplishes anything, it pisses off the pig, and it spoils the taste of the bacon. :-)
