I’m having a little trouble interpreting your tone here. I was considering simply not responding. But I’m going to try one last time.
This:
You’ve repeated the same question here about 4 or 5 times in different forms. In a face-to-face interaction, I would interpret this to mean that you were becoming angry, and were challenging the veracity of my statement.
On a discussion forum, it’s a little bit trickier. No body language. No tone of voice. No facial expressions.
So, it’s probably best to make your point directly.
But when I read your posts carefully, I believe that all of your statements are being made in good faith. I do suspect, however, that there’s a decent likelihood that you’re not deeply aware of your own emotional reactions to things and how they may enter into your responses. So, if you are really asking me a question, and not just expressing anger, here is the explanation:
- When you first typed, “ are you talking about astrology?”, I originally imagined that you might not be open to astrological ideas or concepts; and might even feel antipathy or even threat in response to its discussion.
- Later, when asked if you were “making a judgment/assessment in the form of a question” you typed: “no definitely not. and I’m surprised I’m giving that impression…” Reading that made me think, ‘Oh, I was wrong. He can handle the possibility of different perspectives. He’s just curious and asking questions.’
But then 12 hours went by and
- You typed: “ astrological ideas are on the same level as flat earth theory when it comes to the level of scientific i evidence backing up the claims made by astrology. I’m genuinely surprised any adult human can believe in something like that.”. And that made me think, ‘Oh, I think my original thought was correct.’
That surprised me and made me laugh. Hence, I typed ‘hahaha’. That is my sense of humor. It’s very likely not quite the same as your sense of humor.
but my laughter was not intended to be condescending.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but as a person who views astrology as pseudoscience you are actually on the more popular side of this issue. Most educated people in the world would, similarly to you, subscribe to the materialist paradigm represented by Newtonian physics. As such, you probably do not really need to worry about condescension being directed at you.
There are alternate potential explanations for why astrology could still work that do not require one to abandon one’s belief in the laws of classical physics. But the truth is, they’re not very difficult to unearth. Particularly with Chat-GPT available, you could review the main points of these arguments for yourself in the space of 20 minutes or so.
Debating about it does not seem worth my time right now.
So, I hope what I’m attempting to communicate makes it across to you. No, there was no condescending laughter at your expense. Yes, I was surprised (and somewhat tickled) that I turned out to be on the right track about your point of view. And as I said originally, I don’t mind very much that our points of view on this topic differ.
And now, if you want to continue this exchange, we should probably do it somewhere else. This thread was meant as a focused reflection on wealth-related work by Azriel. I am okay with all of these unrelated posts being deleted if Azriel wants to do that.
