Comment by evandale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evandale | Hacker News Reader

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Is checking your horoscope considered believing in astrology? I ask because I check mine, but mostly for morning reminders and put my head on straight.

Today mine starts with "The universe may deliver an ego bruise or two today, dear Virgo, as brooding Pluto squares off with the Nodes of Fate" and while I don't believe they're predicting a specific event it's nice to have that in the back of my mind today.

Coincidentally, I have an email I'm expecting to be in my work inbox this morning that could be a bit of an ego bruiser. I've been dreading it all weekend and I was thinking about how to approach it last night and decided I was not going react and reply to the email today. After reading my horoscope this morning I had the idea that skipping the email today and not even reading it might be a good thing to do. It's not going to be urgent or require a reply so why not ignore it today if I think it's going to ruin my day? It damn near ruined my weekend and I don't even know if it's in my inbox.

For me, my horoscope is no different from reading a random motivational quote every morning.

> Is checking your horoscope considered believing in astrology?

I don't think this is something that I can answer, but at the very least it says that you're neutral enough toward it to allow it to speak into your life.

That's why I think of it as more of reading a motivational quote that will inspire me to do something that day. I try not to take it too seriously, but my conflict with astrology is that I don't want to believe it, but I can't shake the fact that the moon affects the tides on Earth from my brain.

That makes me question if the moon can affect humans. The whole personality prediction and things like that I'm not a believer at all, but the moon affecting our mood? I can buy it.

We are made up of a lot of water, especially our brains, and I'm not confident enough to say it's impossible the moon can affect us. Mars and Venus are a lot more kooky, because even though we don't know how gravity works we're pretty certain it doesn't have a strong effect for small masses over long distances.

I will admit I'm more willing to say astrology is a "maybe, who knows" compared to the existence of God. For me the existence of God is a firm no and I'm pretty confident in that.

There's a lot more evidence for God than astrology.

As a non-believer I wouldn't go as far as to say there's evidence for God, but I definitely agree with the spirit of your comment. Evidence against astrology is abundant, trivially easy to replicate, and the alleged narrative behind how astrology works is obviously incompatible with our knowledge of the Universe to the point that an educated middle schooler could explain why. None of that could be said about God.

If I read it, then I usually read all 12 of them and try to decide how many of them fit better than my own one. Not sure that counts as believing, more being easily amused.

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