I am on a mailing list for work at home jobs. I often see on the list that psychic hotlines are looking for workers to work on the psychic phone lines (we will train). There was a recent outcry when it became public that welfare-to-work applicants were being recruited to work as telephone psychics. There is even a website by a person who tells of his experience. You can find his page by doing a search on "confessions of a telephone psychic".
I am an advocate for people using discernment and being fulling informed of the history of any belief system they choose. That is why I provided the link earlier in this thread to the history of what we call astrology.
Our country's greatest strength of freedom is also its achilles heel, in that under the freedom to believe, many have created belief systems that bring harm when put into action. There is a law suit beginning in Idaho against the Aryan Nations group that brings out the problem of protecting beliefs that lead to harmful actions. There needs to be discernment in seeing that acting out a belief is not always healthy for people, and in my particular concern, not always healthy for children.
I receive emails every day from people who have realized that they have been duped, lost years of opportunity, their health, and the welfare of their children was neglected, because they believed in a spirituality that turned out to be based on fraud. These people were well meaning, they only wanted to find their true purpose in life, serve God, save the planet, and all manner of altruistic motives. They did not know when they began to practice the beliefs they were taught that the astrology, channeling, etc. was not spirituality. At the time they took up these beliefs, they did not know the history of the people who were held up as spiritual masters and gurus. They will never have those years back, and their children will never have healthy childhoods to remember.
It is because I do believe in authentic loving of one another, truth, honesty, goodness, peace, responsibility, accountability, and ethics, that I speak out on this subject. If what I say leads one person to really find out the facts behind practices such as astrology, fortune telling, psychics, then I think it is worth any heat I may get for speaking out.
As Wolfgang points out, beliefs can be used to justify many practices. Beliefs are used to justify war, human sacrifice, and all manner of atrocities. Questioning the basis of our beliefs is our responsibility.
I remember when spirituality used to mean the greatest commmandment, "love one another". I'm not saying this to preach religion. My point is that with the baby boom generation, we have come to define spirituality as fortune telling, magic rituals, communicating with the dead, casting horoscopes, perfumed candles, exotic gurus, and so forth. None of these really have anything to do with spirituality, in my opinion. It might feel nice/smell nice, but to me, spirituality is loving one another. I consider it loving of me to do what I can to prevent people from being the victims of fraud, and from families and children being led down the slippery slope from one seemingly harmless superstition to something progressively more destructive. If I held back this information, I would consider that an omission on my part to provide just the information someone may need to make an informed and constructive choice about what they choose to believe.
Alice