[popalchemist]

You, like most people, are unfamiliar with the metaphysical underpinnings and historical origins of astrology, so you have no real place to stand on the question of the validity of its claims. The only way you could is if you were intimately familiar with the topic.

Anyway, even if you take the metaphysical claims out of the equation entirely, as Carl Jung did, you can still derive great value from a system of thought-organization like Astrology. In Carl Jung's work he found that regardless of the claims about causation and personality, the symbological mappings of the zodiac represents something close to a map of cardinal archetypes, or you might think of them as psycho-social behavior blueprints that are intrinsic due to our evolutionary history and ALSO, as a secondary layer, culturally conditioned.

Point being... taking the stance you take, of accepting things only if they can be empirically proven, would prevent a person like you from ever gaining that insight / wisdom.

Your strength of intelligence is the greatest barrier to the growth of your wisdom.

[dbspin]

This is simply a variation of the no true Scotsman argument. In other words a classic fallacy. For someone to dispute the claims of <THEORY> they must be intimately familiar with <THEORY>. Were they familiar with it they would obviously not discount it. If they discount it, they must not be familiar with it.

As previously stated - you can believe anything you like, and it may even be useful to do so. For example there's solid research that religious belief has positive health outcomes. However that has no impact on the truth value of any religious or other metaphysical belief.

Again, theress a strong academic quantitate (and parallel quantitative) tradition of cross cultural psychology. Tacking such questions from a more rigorous point of view - including comparison of epistemic and ontological traditions. I'd recommend Mac McLaughin's text 'Culture and Health' as a good starting point.

https://www.google.ie/books/edition/Culture_and_Health/VAbbA...