AP reports:
A lot of American adults — about 3 in 10 — make use of astrology, tarot cards or fortunetellers at least once a year. But only a small fraction of them rely on what they learn from these practices to make major decisions.The Catholic Church has a long history of discouraging superstition. As Christianity declines, superstition will increase.That’s according to a nationwide survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center, encompassing 9,593 U.S. adults who were interviewed last October.
Overall, according to Pew, about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say they engage in at least one of these activities mostly “just for fun,” while about 1 in 10 say they engage mostly because they “believe the practices give them helpful insights.” Only about 1% say they rely “a lot” on what they learn from these practices when making major life decisions.
Yet it’s a big business. The psychic services industry — which encompasses various specialties such as astrology, palm-reading, psychic readings and fortunetelling — generated an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2024 and employed 105,000 people, according to market research firm IBIS World.
3 comments:
Roger,
I once was a catholic myself....and I have to tell you,
While I do applaud many things the Catholic church does, there are a lot of things it has done I'm not even remotely keen about.
The Catholic church may not like other people's superstition, but it certainly doesn't mind it's own ridiculous dogmas it replaced many of those superstitions with. They might eschew those nasty psychics and fortune tellers, BUT...
...they just LOVE all their precious prophecies, Saints from A to Z, Mary is God's mom, obsessing over the Holy Trinity ALL the time for no discernible purpose, obsessing endlessly over the bureaucracy of purgatory and heaven...and if any one is even there yet, demanding everyone tell a priest every bad little dirty thought that ever went through their head, being punished by saying many long boring prayers over those dirty little no-good thoughts, over-interpreted/inflated visions and dreams, goofy miracles, magically blessed items, anything whatsoever to do with the shroud of turin, demonic possessions and ensuing exorcisms, stigmata every which way, divine callings, and constantly seeing images that look like Jesus and Mary on everything from rust water stains to clouds. With all this supernatural busy-body business going on, it's plain to see that the Church's real complaint against hocus pocus is that they just don't like competition.
That's why I left the Catholic church, there was simply way too much canonized bullshit for me to shovel through BY THE TON just to get to the good stuff. I'm a natural born sinner, not a saint, life is short and I don't have that much patience.
I get your point, but there is a difference. There are millions of people who will make a life-altering decision based on random nonsense from a psychic or fortune teller.
Someone might also consult a Catholic priest about a big decision, but the priest is more likely to say to pray and meditate about it. That advice can be helpful, even if there is no Holy Trinity.
I was being blithe with what I wrote, but I am deeply indebted to the good things the Catholic church did over the centuries to preserve knowledge that even agreed with their own positions, and the Church's efforts to make people consider their behavior and actions in a world that didn't have the legality of lawyers and courts everywhere. As with everything, context is king, and even though there were dark times of persecution and occasional bad popes, overall, the Church did rather well in an extremely chaotic world.
I was taught to be a catholic by a Trappist Monk when I was a boy at the only monastery in all of Utah, and found his teachings and perspectives to be thought provoking, profound, and honest. I was very disheartened when I discovered how ostentatious and political much of the Church was compared to the elegant simplicity and non materialist viewpoints of the Trappist monastic tradition. Would the rest of the church follow by their lived example more closely, I would probably still be a catholic.
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