Astrology and fortune-telling as contemporary hazards for moral life

Abstract

In lives of numerous contemporaries we may observe a rather peculiar dualism. On the one hand, they tend to have respect for science and use the fruits of technological progress and, on the other hand, they are ready to entrust their own decisions to guidance of various types of “spiritual counsellors” referring directly to astrology and fortune-telling. The persons “tell” the future, “release” those interested and their houses of alleged evil energies and “break” imaginary blockades, which are accountable for various misfortunes in one’s life, with the use of spells. 

The phenomena seem to constitute a visible sign of the crisis of rationality and wider understood crisis of civilisation. It was overcoming of a mythological and imaginary method of explaining reality with its tendency to ascribe divine attributes to various cosmic forces that was the turning point, which determined shaping of the European civilisation. The trust for human reason interpreting natural laws and accepting the truth of revealed faith, thus stripping celestial bodies of their divine nimbus, made it possible to overcome the superstitious fatalism. The revival of convictions assuming secret influence of the bodies upon fates of particular persons and the world must, therefore, be interpreted as a sign of a significant cultural regression.

A particular hazard for moral life is caused by the fact that accepting the conviction that one’s fate is somehow predestined, one resigns from responsible controlling one’s own more or less consciously, which has unfavourable effects for him or her, both as regards a clearly natural perspective as well as supernatural one.

A rational thought on astrology and its associated practices of fortunetelling nature makes one differentiate between cause and effects relationships, which occur in the world from an objective point of view, and those, which constitute results of overinterpretation on the part of the human mind, which sometimes connects any plots randomly just as in the case of an oneiric vision. This thought also makes it possible to differentiate between effects of forces in nature, which can be foreseen on the basis of deterministic laws governing nature and discovered by physics and astronomy and the impossible-to-prove alleged influence of the forces, which would finally determine moral acts of human beings.