Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Is Emperor Astrology Superstition or a Religious Belief?

Made mysterious by certain events (see History of Emperor Astrology), many practitioners exploited on the public's fears and misinformed ideas in order to rake in great amounts of material benefits. This made many to believe that Chinese astrological calculation methods like Emperor Astrology and Eight Characters, a form of superstition. To make matters worse, the recent insurgence of scientific revolutions condemned these methods and form of thoughts as "pseudo-psychology" and/or "non-scientific, as they are non-replicable and not based on empirical data".

Superstition can be summed up to be blind faith, where one does not explore the facts behind events, nor does one discern between that which is right or that which is easy. Emperor Astrology itself does not promote superstition, nor does it believe in total-determinism. Whether it is superstitious or religious will be fully up to the practitioner himself/herself. Rather, Emperor Astrology is an astrological calculation method that forecasts life-trends based on centuries of findings by its practitioners. There is no 100% accuracy but it is able to foretell the most-likely influences upon one's environment, interactions, relationships, perception, and experience. Depending on the practitioner's level of mastery, it can range from 70% to as high as 80%. Ethical Emperor Astrology practitioners will never advocate the belief in total-determinism, that all things are fixed, and pre-destined in such a way that nobody has a choice in making his/her own decisions. The truth is that ethical Emperor Astrology practitioners will always maintain their stand that all things are flexible, as the interpretations of the charts only show the likelihoods and not the "definite musts". Everyone has the capability of making choices and it is up to every single human being to what his/her ultimate choice lies in.

Coming back to the discussion on Emperor Astrology as a form of science, it can be said that all of science is based on facts, hypotheses, theories, and laws. But even scientific laws can be refuted as shown by Einstein with regards to Newton's Law. As mentioned in the History of Emperor Astrology, the lack of empirical data was due to the war-torn times as well as the ancient practitioners' mindsets of safeguarding secrets. It takes time to polish and refine methods; just as it takes many years of experimentation and testing to prove a hypothesis. With the recent rise of Chinese metaphysics in the scientific world, many practitioners are now collecting data to prove that methods like Emperor Astrology are well-founded by empirical data. There is a limitation to full-fledge scientific studies due to the fact that many of these studies are based on case and descriptive studies, and not experimental studies. Thus, due to the difficulties in designing experimental studies, theories based on Emperor Astrology have yet to be tested and validated. On the other hand, practitioners are now actively reviewing ancient texts and revising the astrological methods so that they make proper sense in the current context and environment. All that is required now will be time, proper education of the public/media/practitioners, scientific statistical data collection, and laying out a code of ethics for the practitioners of Emperor Astrology.

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