For Alice and the rest of the Mudcat Pothole Gallery: RE the propoganda (ie malicious fallacies) in your posts and how to avoid them in future

This is specifically in reference to Alice's words I know people who have given all their life savings to gurus they believed in, allowed their children to be abused, deferred having children or gave their children up because of their spiritual following of the guru's commands, spent fortunes on psychic readers, given up education and careers to be the unpaid labor of their gurus and even committed suicide for their non-scientific beliefs. We have only to see the planes of 9/11 and the fields of Jonestown to understand ... People can be made to kill and die for their beliefs, as the world sadly sees every day."

Notice how lopsided and negative this argument is! She tries very carefully to avoid the direct use of slanted metaphor (after having just witnessed what happened to poor ole Professor Bill) but still, her entire post(s) is slanted.

Notice how she focuses entirely on certain 'media darlings" -- highly twisted, horrible, tragic and (thankfully) very rare effects of "belief -- while completely ignoring the vast array of everyday positive ones (ie the countless lives saved and people helped via charities run by the religious; the personal hope, comfort and inspiration toward love and goodwill that many many religious people find in their faith every day etc etc)

In so doing, she hopes to create the same lopsided, distorted and patently false impression of the subject under discussion here as she does of 'belief' in general. And a lot of readers are taken in by this no doubt .... but not this one.

So, why do people like Alice and Bill and rest of the potholes do what they do to mislead others? And what can be done about it? From the article I linked to:

"When a propagandist warns members of her audience that disaster will result if they do not follow a particular course of action, she is using the fear appeal. By playing on the audience's deep-seated fears, practitioners of this technique hope to redirect attention away from the merits of a particular proposal and toward steps that can be taken to reduce the fear.

This technique can be highly effective when wielded by a fascist demagogue, but it is typically used in less dramatic ways ...

When confronted with persuasive messages that capitalize on our fear, we should ask ourselves the following questions:

    * Is the speaker exaggerating the fear or threat in order to obtain my support?
    * How legitimate is the fear that the speaker is provoking?
    * Will performing the recommended action actually reduce the supposed threat?
    * When viewed dispassionately, what are the merits of the speaker's proposal? "

Now, certain potholes above claim I've also ignored "evidence" (???) contradicting my views, in spite of the fact that there's absolutely no such thing for me to ignore here, even if I wanted to!

Nothing posted on this thread 'proves' or 'disproves' anything a thing I've said about astrology, scientifically or otherwise! "Proving" or "disproving" astrology via objective scientific methodology is simply not possible to date.

In fact, it may never be possible.

Having read many of the articles cited above to disprove astrology, as well as the excellent precis from the always illuminating Wolfgang, I must point out that the abundance of evidence is that astrology works despite the fact that it may be completely unfounded. One article, intended to "disprove" astrology actually provided 34 reasons why astrology works, even though it shouldn't.

This beats science completely, since science has to be right in order to work, and I think that this is what makes scientists so angry about astrology--

Hear hear, MTed!