Why do people believe in religion and astrology

Survey Report
I wanted to find reasons why people believe in faith or a belief system. So I decided to do
some research on why people believe in religions and astrology. I first read an article called “11
reasons to believe in astrology” by mypandit about people's reasons for believing in astrology
and evidence that backed up their reasons. Then I also looked at a timeline and the full history of
astrology and with that I found out where it came from, how it started, how it became popular for
people to believe in today, and why/how people back then believed it and used it. I also found an
article called “Is there a religion that beleives in astrology” by Sean B. that explained astrology
and religion. It explained if astrology was science or its own religion, if astrology conflicts with
religion, and how some religions believed in astrology. Then with religions, I found an article
called “The main reason no one should trust astrology” by glenn Geher explaining why people
shouldn’t trust astrology and saying how it’s bad to believe in and provided evidence talking
about that people only believe because of the barnum effect. Then I watched a video called
“ZEITGEIST - PART 1” by the creator boschev that explained where religion first started and
how religion spread all over the world to other civilizations with their god's backstories and their
beliefs about their gods. But with this research about religion and astrology, some of it took me
back to centuries and millennia ago when almost everybody believed in a faith or a belief
system. I, however, wanted to find more present-day reasons why people believe in faith or a
belief system.

To do this I created my own survey for people to take that asked them about their beliefs,
why they believe it, and more. Most questions were open-ended so people could express how
they felt about their beliefs and why they believe in them. I split the survey into 2 parts: the first
part was about religion and the other part was about astrology. Questions for religion were what
religion they were, if they were forced into it, if they like their religion, if they think it’s
important, have they ever questioned it, and if they thought it was wrong if someone didn’t
believe in a religion. Questions for astrology were the same but instead of it saying religion it
said astrology. I asked what people believed in to see if there were different or similar answers
from people who believe in faith/astrology and those who don’t. I had 21 people in total take my
survey.

After gathering the statistical analysis from all 21 people I made 12 conclusions in total
about my survey’s answers. I made 7 conclusions about the first half of the survey about religion.
I then made 5 conclusions about the other half that had questions about astrology.

Here are the conclusions from the religion part of my survey. First, out of all the 21
people who took my survey 52.4% or 11 people are religious and 47.6% (10 people) are not
religious. I thought the number of religious people would be higher because I know a lot of
people who are religious and it seems that a lot of people in the world follow a religion.

Out of all of the religious people from my survey all of them said they started believing
since birth which can’t be true; however, 36.4% of those people were forced into their religion.
They said this is because their families forced them to believe and partake in religious activities
at a young age and they grew up always having to do religious activities even if they didn’t want
to. This also applies to the people who took my survey and are not religious as 80% of
non-religious people from my survey were also forced into a religion by their families before but
they stopped believing and stopped being a part of the religion that they were in. I do not like the
fact that families force religion onto their children. I say this because 90.9 % of the people who
believe in religion like following their religion. That’s 10/11 people. This means that 9.1% or
one person from the survey does not like following their current religion but is forced to anyway.

Out of 11 people, 63.6% of religious people have questioned their religion before but still
stick with their religion and believe in it. For the non-religious people when they were forced to
believe in religion 90% of them questioned their religion before switching to not believing in it.
The other 10% is from a non-religious person who never believed in religion their whole life so
technically speaking 9/9 people that used to have a religion questioned it before they stopped
believing.

From the rest of the religion survey, I found that 45.6% of religious people think religion
is important in life, 18.2% think it’s not important, and 36.4% feel indifferent about it. As for
non-religious people I saw that 10% of them think religion is important in life, 20% think it’s not
important, and 70% feel indifferent about it. All the people who said they were indifferent said
they thought it depends because each person is different and believes in different things in life. I
then found out that 9.1% of religious people think it’s wrong to not believe in a religion and 0%
of non-religious people think it’s wrong to not believe in a religion. I honestly thought the
religion percentage would be a little higher because I feel like they take their religions very
seriously and they are strict with them.

Now on to the conclusions from the astrology part of my survey. Firstly, of the 21 people
who took my survey 33.3% of them or 7 people believe in astrology 66.6% (14 people) do not
believe in astrology. I honestly thought this would be a bit higher since 10 people from the
religion part of the survey did not believe in religion so I thought some of them would’ve then
believed in astrology at least. Of the 7 people that believe in astrology all of them have
questioned astrology before in some way at one point in their life.

Out of 7 people, 28.6% of astrology believers think that astrology is important in life,
42.8% think it’s not important, and 28.6% are indifferent about it. For non-astrology believers,
13.3% of non-astrology believers think that astrology is important, 80% think it’s not important
in life, and 6.6% are indifferent about it. Finally, the last question of my survey was if people
think it is wrong to believe in astrology. The results from this were very surprising to me. 0% of
astrology believers think it is wrong to believe in astrology and 0% of non astrology believers
think it is wrong to believe in astrology. I would’ve at least thought one person from the
non-astrology believers would’ve thought it was wrong to believe in it.