u/ORigel2

No, they worship a god affiliated with the planet Saturn, but in their narcissism they imagine the Creator chose them.

Feb. 2026: Saturn-Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries

June 2032: Saturn-Uranus conjunction

Feb. 2033: Jupiter-Pluto conjunction

Yeah, I was wrong. It still counted as the start of a new cycle. Maybe the 2026 conjunction will be even more important to humanity's spiritual developmemt than the Axial Age of prophetic religion, science, and philosophy.

No, occultists learn to distinguish between benevolent spirits and demonic impostors.

The Israelite scriptures got a lot of stuff wrong or half true. And some stuff is literally wrong but symbolically true.

Jesus, the angels, and saints seem to disagree with institutional dogma of humans, from the accounts of Christian and ecclectic pagan occultists who work with them.

Personal practices, inncluding  occult practices, can be more effective and also align better with truth, than mainstream religion.

Most Western occultists have been Christian, though it's not my thing.

So why would following or working with other benevolent gods and spirits be any riskier than going to Mass on Sunday?

And with other spirits, avoiding the nasty ones like demons, practicing regular banishing rituals, and treating neutral spirits with respect or leaving them alone go a long way.

So is attending Mass on Sunday dangerous because Jesus is not not under our control and can therefore be equated to a wild animal?

Occultists can: -- Pray to or otherwise work with good gods, angels, saints --Practice regular banishing rituals that work much better than many public religious practices --Find a path that fits better with reality as you perceive it, instead of blindly accepting the dogma of others --Believe in reward or punishment after death and/or karma --Get guidance on the future with divination --Follow a code of ethics --Attend the services of the majority religion in addition to occult practice

Haydn Trumpet Concerto

The fashions and rulings of mainstream intellectuals and judges are irrelevant to the question of whether Western or Vedic astrological traditions work.

Respectable people in the West a priori reject the idea that the planets (lumps of rock or gas) can affect us in any ways besides the most obvious. Yet they continue to affect us.

That attitude is a legacy of the Copernican revolution and of the Bible's prohibition on divination.

From what I was taught, one of the most important abilities humans are supposed to learn is free will and how to make decisions. 

Our higher selves have desires but don't have the ability to make decisions-- they're in a dream state. They create Personalities that are limited but more focused, and have a degree of free will. Eventually, your Higher Self will learn how to awaken from the dream state without incarnating in a material body, with access to all its past life memories.

But it will still be serving higher powers, like adult citizens of a free country have more freedom than they did as children but cannot do anything they want.

I mean, they would reject Vedic astrology as pseudoscience too, if they knew it existed. Astrology goes against their worldview.

To master all the lessons you need to learn from being incarnated as human, in however many lifetimes it takes.

Also, your next life might not be so bad.

What we want don't matter. We already went through it countless times and remember little to nothing about our previous incarnations. 

No, you go to purgatory and/or heaven for a while before reincarnating.

My rising sign describes me better than my Sun sign.

Those same scientists think ALL astrology is pseudoscience, despite knowing nothing about it besides newspaper Sun sign horoscopes.

In my natal chart, Sagitarius Mercury is squaring Pisces Jupiter, which I think represents a tension between faith and reason making me insecure about my beliefs in general.

There are Christian occult traditions, too. 

My tenative belief: I think Jehovah/Jesus isn't being entirely honest to his followers (i.e. that there are multiple gods and valid systems; and that Jesus Christ frequently acted like a douchebag before his Resurrection), but that Christianity contains some truth.

You think that's a fair representation of Christianity? Jesus said that none know the day nor the hour, and that false prophets will deceive many, even some of the elect.

I don't think Amelia Bones believed Voldemort was back at that point: she and the Wizengamot saw Fudge encroaching on their authority and pushed back.

Why wouldn't the USA be Sagitarrius rising (founded on beliefs, plus its expansion) founded late in the afternoon of July 4th, 1776?