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Comment by machina_ex_deus | Hacker News Reader

To me there is an a huge difference. I can accept religions, which are adding axioms that aren't falsifiable, and that are usually taught to a person when he is a child. And religions had their roles in shaping society for good.

I can accept conspiracy theories and disbelieving the known consensus.

I just can't accept a person who, in the age where we know exactly how planets move and what they are, decided to believe they have correlation with psychology.

It's the worst. It shows the person doesn't even try to connect cause and effect in a meaningful way, and in astrology this is all there is to it. No epistemology. No logic. It's one thing to believe in unfalsifiable things, and another to believe in falsifiable things that we fully understand and have no causual relationship.

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I feel it's more of a personal background issue. Do you really have objection with planets effects on personality but at the same time feel turning water into wine is plausible in the slightest?

To a raised atheist all religions are not far removed from belief in Santa Claus. But to someone with religious people in the family cutting them off may come not as natural as of strangers with astrology brain.

Or how about the sun dancing around the sky?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun

On the page you have linked, there is a section titled "Skeptical explanations," which contains explanations of the event that are both plausible and satisfying. If you stare at the sun for a while you're going to see some weird stuff. Don't try it at home.

Saying water/wine happened exactly once 2000 years ago is much harder to falsify than claiming a present, ongoing, and universal correlation between planetary bodies and psychology.

We know chemistry in the same way we know planetary motion.

> a present, ongoing, and universal correlation between planetary bodies and psychology.

I mean, here we are, talking about something that starts with those planetary bodies.

Magicians can do what looks like turning water into wine easily. Is that seriously your biggest issue with religion? If there's anything to be really skeptical about its that a person resurrected from the dead, rest of the miracles are pretty mundane in modern standards. And the way I understand their epistemology, they know it happened because people saw him both dying and living afterwards, so it boils down to whether you believe their accounts. I don't expect more evidence to that than witnesses, but then again, it's hard to believe when the only evidence is witnesses.

Either way, I don't see a huge epistemological problem with a person believing these things. They might be believing wrong things but at least they do it for reasonable reasons.

You need to distinguish between epistemology and logic. It's much more important to get your epistemology correctly than your logic. It's ok to be wrong with your reasoning, you can still have an intelligent discussion. But talking to a person without epistemology is like talking to the wall. You're playing chess and he's playing checkers.

If the other person doesn't epistemologically need cause and effect relationships to believe in something, and it doesn't matter to him, I can't have an intelligent discussion. I can't reason without cause and effect, and if it doesn't matter to the other person it's completely hopeless.

>> they know it happened because people saw him both dying and living afterwards, so it boils down to whether you believe their accounts.

I come from a religious background, born and raised catholic, and even in our indoctrinating upbringing it was made clear that the new testament isn't eyewitness testimony. It's a written story of something someone said. Given the age of the material this is the best we're going to get, obviously, but it's not quite as clear cut as it might seem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament

" They were written between approximately 70 and 100 AD, and were the end-products of a long process of development; all are anonymous, and almost certainly none are the work of eyewitnesses."

One of the books that I've come across that gets into the development process of the gospels is:

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

According to that book, there was a fair bit of religious conflict between the gonastic branch and the proto-orthordox (and some others too) with gospels and edits that attempt to discredit the other sects or build up their own narrative that is in agreement with their faith.

Wikipedia is incredibly biased when it comes to certain topics, especially anything pertaining to Jesus. The irony is, the section you have quoted doesn’t even have a source attached! More reading: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

It's better than Britannica and other encyclopedias and has been for over a decade.

Just because it doesn't support your _preferred_ narrative doesn't undermine the fact that it's effectively the most trustworthy source on damn near any topic including that one.

Ok, is what I said wrong then? It's literally what I've been told by catholic priests as well - Wikipedia was just the easiest source to link here.

I like to think that most adults understand the difference between a trick that appears to verse actually turning water into wine and wouldn't worship a magician as the son of God if they saw the trick directly.

water into wine is a fun story but pointless.

but plenty of Luke and Matthew underpin Christian ethics, and have been the justification for building schools, charities, hospitals, etc. for centuries.

people will hear what they want to hear, e.g. Loaves and Fishes vs. Angry Revaluation Jesus, but at least there is an attempt at altruism there.

Astrology has all of the woo woo mythology without attempting any sort of actual altruism, just inane categorization.

I feel like it's a "part" or incomplete religion. I'm not sure where it came from but I could easily believe it was a part of a larger set of beliefs.

They have also been the justification for crusades, wich burning, science denial, Jew prosecutions and indulgencies.

> turning water into wine is plausible in the slightest?

If you drop hallucinogens into water, it could be perceived to others that people would be getting drunk off water, which would be, in effect, turning water into wine. The story could have come from this, easily plausible.

When people say they "literally did so and so" do you freak out about calculating the possibilities of their specific mention or do you sit back and understand what parables, allegory, and stories are?

Besides, If you don't believe it really happened, what's the point of picking apart the story?

Yet religions have a vision of the workings of planets (and the solar system in general) that is much further removed from reality than astrology.

Yes, you could say it's a metaphor, a symbolic vision or something else rather than something to be taken literally in religion, but the same could be said of astrology.

That is the bar of discussion though. If you literally believe the aspects of religion that are obviously, observably false, then that doesn’t bode well.

At least religions bother making their false predictions untestable. How do you fall for something that proves itself wrong every day?

I think you can find ample evidence of astrology and religious predictions evolving to be more vague after criticism via clear contrary evidence.

The world has forgotten to end a few times now.

Did you include consciousness in the model of reality you're mistaking for reality itself? Because it can provide a causal link between pretty much anything, making your reductive "rational" analysis junk, if not dangerous.

Faith comes in many forms, in any undertaking human are involved in including science, watch out!

You speak as if religion and astrology are two different things.

Not all Hindus believe in astrology, but very many do, and within contemporary Hinduism it is very much mainstream belief. And many Hindus who believe in astrology would reject the idea of drawing any firm boundary between their astrological beliefs and the rest of their religion. [0]

Hinduism is not the only religion to promote astrology: it is also a very common thing in contemporary Western Neopaganism/Wicca/etc. While contemporary Christianity is (with rare exception) anti-astrology, it was much more accepting of it in the Middle Ages, even into the early modern period – "papal astrologer" was once a real job description.

[0] https://iskconeducationalservices.org/HoH/lifestyle/expressi...

> ...to believe in falsifiable things that we fully understand and have no causual relationship.

Not to give astrology or any particular belief system any credit, but how can one ever truly say that we "fully" understand anything in this reality?

This is a highly fallible trait that allows "science" to become a belief system in and of itself.

> I just can't accept a person who, in the age where we know exactly how planets move and what they are, decided to believe they have correlation with psychology.

The irony of you letting that affect your mind is amusing.

This is a really good comment, I'm sorry you're getting downvoted.

This is literally the underlying context of the discussion

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