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."
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.
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.
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.