Young people are flocking to astrology

You shouldn't, though. Belief in astrology is certainly irrational, but it's not incompatible with being intelligent. In fact, the more intelligent a person is, the higher the chance that they have at least some irrational belief, because it takes intelligence to weave together a plausible-sounding chain of reasoning for why the belief is true.

Broadly, belief in irrational things such as this are highly correlated with people being insecure, afraid, and/or feeling that they have little control over their lives. You can see the correlation in populations between how insecure the population is and belief in this sort of thing.

So, don't look at it as indicative of intelligence. It's an emotional/social thing, not a brainy thing.

you mean, people who don't believe there's a god (theism is a belief in a god, not just any belief or even any religion)

that's what an atheist is (which is the same thing as a "true atheist", as long as we're making up phrases)

a good example of an atheistic belief is "you should be excellent to each other, because it sucks when people aren't like that to you" - no god required

There's nothing wrong with enjoying parts of it and appreciating how and why it was used historically.

There's of course opprobrium about teaching it in modern scientific situations such as (most) Planetarium lectures. Some of that is because Astrology accumulated so much psuedo-psychological/sociological baggage and many scientists I know don't want to touch that sort of mostly superstitious pigeonholing with a ten foot pole if they can avoid it.

But a lot of it is as simple as it is interesting in a history class. It's not science, it's not reflected in modern science. Wanting to put it into a science lecture or class is one of those "Teach the Controversy" things [1] (as I alluded to a few in the previous comment). There is no controversy, that science is formally and completely outdated. Teaching the "controversy" provides too much weight to an outmoded model that hasn't been viable scientifically in centuries. Teaching it next to the real science mistakenly implies that it may still be valid or useful scientifically. It lets people that religiously love something like the personality quiz aspects of Astrology pat themselves on the back for "believing in science" when its ties to modern science are historic at best. (It lets people that don't believe in scientific expertise yell "see, they are teaching that a controversy exists so clearly they have no idea and you shouldn't listen to experts".)

To return to your analogy, you can go to a place like Stonehenge and see/feel/smell the weight of history. A science classroom (including Planetariums) isn't supposed to be a history classroom or a library, and confusing the two hurts the goals and aims of science way more than it hurts history, in part because people can't see the weight of history in a science classroom. Similarly, too, it is hard to be accused of Bronze Age Druidism in modern times simply because no groups claim to be actively tied to Bronze Age Druidism. It's been centuries since most of them disappeared (or were slaughtered) or moved on to other beliefs. There are plenty of modern "New Age" people that actively claim to be deep believers in Astrology, especially all its "personality quiz" stuff. Astrology never went away.

Absolutely, love the quirky interests that you love. I had a phase in Middle School where I got deep into Astrology myself because it was a fun "LARP" of a sort to roleplay with friends, then that led to Tarot, and that led to a brief flirtation with card tricks and mentalism. (It may or may not have helped that all of those things are in relatively close proximity under the Dewey Decimal system.) I'd never take that sort of silly journey away from the next kid, even if I am worried about all the kids that never outgrow some of those phases. I do think the library is the better way to discover Astrology than a Planetarium, though.

[1] https://amorphia-apparel.com/teach/

Islamic civilisation would have never existed without Islam the religion. Even if we suppose the Arabs might have expanded into an empire under someone other than Muhammad, the end result would have looked very different. Islam was the glue that held together an empire composed of many different ethnicities, cultures, languages, tribes; without Islam, they would not have had that glue.

> You cannot control people while also pushing the limits of humanity, they are mutually exclusive. To ignore this is to ignore religious systems were always about control and order, not progress.

The first few thousand years of human civilisations were all about power and control. They did a perfectly good job of pushing the then-existent limits of humanity despite lacking individualism. It is only as we get into the modern period that individualism began to produce real benefits (new ideas, science, technology); but without that earlier anti-individualism, it would never have had the economic foundation it needed to produce those benefits. Even in the modern period, the benefits of individualism have mainly been something pursued by the upper and middle classes, economically sustained by the exploitation of the working class and by colonialism.

We also really don't know what the future holds. The religious fundamentalism of the Puritans led to the founding of the English colony of Massachusetts; maybe decades or centuries from now, religious fundamentalists will end up playing a major role in colonising our solar system – they may have motivations to establish colonies that secular people lack.

Details do matter, because they lump all religions together and attempt to argue against them as a whole, not realizing that there exist core differences among them, even if there is potentially large overlap between say Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Disregarding these facts is doing an injustice to themselves and to their audience, and spreads ignorance and malice.