To a raised atheist all religions are not far removed from belief in Santa Claus. But to someone with religious people in the family cutting them off may come not as natural as of strangers with astrology brain.
Either way, I don't see a huge epistemological problem with a person believing these things. They might be believing wrong things but at least they do it for reasonable reasons.
You need to distinguish between epistemology and logic. It's much more important to get your epistemology correctly than your logic. It's ok to be wrong with your reasoning, you can still have an intelligent discussion. But talking to a person without epistemology is like talking to the wall. You're playing chess and he's playing checkers.
If the other person doesn't epistemologically need cause and effect relationships to believe in something, and it doesn't matter to him, I can't have an intelligent discussion. I can't reason without cause and effect, and if it doesn't matter to the other person it's completely hopeless.
I come from a religious background, born and raised catholic, and even in our indoctrinating upbringing it was made clear that the new testament isn't eyewitness testimony. It's a written story of something someone said. Given the age of the material this is the best we're going to get, obviously, but it's not quite as clear cut as it might seem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament
" They were written between approximately 70 and 100 AD, and were the end-products of a long process of development; all are anonymous, and almost certainly none are the work of eyewitnesses."
Just because it doesn't support your _preferred_ narrative doesn't undermine the fact that it's effectively the most trustworthy source on damn near any topic including that one.
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
According to that book, there was a fair bit of religious conflict between the gonastic branch and the proto-orthordox (and some others too) with gospels and edits that attempt to discredit the other sects or build up their own narrative that is in agreement with their faith.
I mean, here we are, talking about something that starts with those planetary bodies.
If you drop hallucinogens into water, it could be perceived to others that people would be getting drunk off water, which would be, in effect, turning water into wine. The story could have come from this, easily plausible.
When people say they "literally did so and so" do you freak out about calculating the possibilities of their specific mention or do you sit back and understand what parables, allegory, and stories are?
Besides, If you don't believe it really happened, what's the point of picking apart the story?
but plenty of Luke and Matthew underpin Christian ethics, and have been the justification for building schools, charities, hospitals, etc. for centuries.
people will hear what they want to hear, e.g. Loaves and Fishes vs. Angry Revaluation Jesus, but at least there is an attempt at altruism there.
Astrology has all of the woo woo mythology without attempting any sort of actual altruism, just inane categorization.
Yes, you could say it's a metaphor, a symbolic vision or something else rather than something to be taken literally in religion, but the same could be said of astrology.
The world has forgotten to end a few times now.
Faith comes in many forms, in any undertaking human are involved in including science, watch out!
Not all Hindus believe in astrology, but very many do, and within contemporary Hinduism it is very much mainstream belief. And many Hindus who believe in astrology would reject the idea of drawing any firm boundary between their astrological beliefs and the rest of their religion. [0]
Hinduism is not the only religion to promote astrology: it is also a very common thing in contemporary Western Neopaganism/Wicca/etc. While contemporary Christianity is (with rare exception) anti-astrology, it was much more accepting of it in the Middle Ages, even into the early modern period – "papal astrologer" was once a real job description.
[0] https://iskconeducationalservices.org/HoH/lifestyle/expressi...
Not to give astrology or any particular belief system any credit, but how can one ever truly say that we "fully" understand anything in this reality?
This is a highly fallible trait that allows "science" to become a belief system in and of itself.
The irony of you letting that affect your mind is amusing.
This is literally the underlying context of the discussion
I can accept conspiracy theories and disbelieving the known consensus.
I just can't accept a person who, in the age where we know exactly how planets move and what they are, decided to believe they have correlation with psychology.
It's the worst. It shows the person doesn't even try to connect cause and effect in a meaningful way, and in astrology this is all there is to it. No epistemology. No logic. It's one thing to believe in unfalsifiable things, and another to believe in falsifiable things that we fully understand and have no causual relationship.