Paul, to continue.
Let's not pretend there's some dichotomy that being comforting is mutually exclusive to not running away from death related issues. Death happens. In fact it's happening alarmingly often. Whilst you're patting someone on the shoulder telling them to spend time with their loved one in the not knowing, I'll be in another room telling someone practical things to allow them to make better informed choices. No this illness is not life threatening, but take the appropriate medical precautions as you normally would. No your husband is not coming back but there's some other relationship that has potential later in the year. Yes, gather your finances to come home now as you may not have much longer with your loved one. Yes, now is a good time to bring her home if she wants to die at home.
The sympathy card is a huge help and an improvement. I just suggest there is more to get to.
Nobody is suggesting "running away from death issues." Notice how you deploy straw man tactics to forward your views. The issues, rather, are how one approaches death that may be near rather than distant; and what the promise of astrology is in human life and death more foundationally.
Let's unpack your advice to a client bit by bit.
Nobody should have to rely on a death-clock prediction to get their affairs and relationships in order. Advise people to do these now. This is the promise of genethliacal astrology. Not horary; although you could tack it onto a horary reading, as appropriate.
So you advise someone to follow doctor's orders? Wonderful. So does the doctor who prescribes the treatments. We don't need an astrologer to do this. Are you going to tell a wife whose husband isn't even dead yet that she can look forward to meeting his replacement while she's still in mourning? This is extremely insensitive. Are you going to play Big Daddy to relatives who should be making up their own minds as to whether to visit a hospitalized family member or not? Why wouldn't a family member bring home a dying mother to die at home if she wanted to, independently of an astrologer's advice, but with the attending physician's advice?
Talk about not wanting to tell other people what to do! Sure, it's proffered as "advice," but your death clock and directional tilt is unmistakeable. You are playing God here, Paul. I just hope you're good at it.
And let us suppose that you personally are this utterly accurate, saintly, considerate, &c, &c, &c sage for people. Doesn't matter in the bigger picture. You've opened the floodgates for anyone else who wants to get a piece of the action, no matter how stupid, inaccurate, or immoral they might be. And they'll be the "astrologers" hand-holding the terrified wife in the hospital visitor's lounge.
We each have our own ways and we each make the choices we feel comfortable with living with. You have made your own and I have made mine. I would never dream of telling you it is unethical if you see signatures of death and do not tell your querent or client. That's your choice, you have to live with the choices you make. Personally I would feel much worse if I someone asked about a medical issue and instead of answering I said "spend time with your loved ones" and they died because they didn't get to that lump in time. Instead I'd feel a hell of a lost less bad if I said "listen that lumps looks malignant, do whatever it takes to get it seen to now, sell that car, remortgage your house if you had to". Whilst you may feel ethically clean and sound with a person dead six feet under you, I'll feel a lot better with a woman who can spend more time with her loved ones now, even if she has to get the bus for a bit.
I greatly appreciate your "free to be you and me" attitude towards my astrology and just about anybody else's. It sounds open-minded, egalitarian, and good-spirited. It is very different from the ton-of-bricks style you take with people who disagree with you on various points of astrology (and which is it, Paul?) but for the sake of this debate, let's take your laissez-faire statements at face value and for the moment.
I have no problem telling querants that I do very little predictive astrology, because I believe that we make choices in life and that these choices affect outcomes at future dates. I may suggest good and bad, likely or unlikely times for something to happen. Otherwise we are into a highly fatalistic, deterministic universe. If I were an expert predictive astrologer and I predicted three children for the querant, this is bound to happen, no matter what she does. Right?
And here's the quandary for fatalistic, deterministic astrologers who do death prediction. IT DOESN'T MATTER THAT YOU GIVE A PREDICTION OR ADVISE A CLIENT.
Que sera, sera. If the kids mortgage the tree house to fly home from Borneo to visit dying Mom in Oshkosh, they would have done that anyway. Or not. If they choose not to fly home and subsequently live wracked with guilt, well, that whole scenario was in the stars as well.
Paul, don't you think that medical professionals have gotten the word out to women about breast lumps? Women over a given age are advised to do a monthly self-examination and get a periodic mammogram. The doctor also does a breast exam during the annual or biennial gyn exam.
Doesn't this position you as practising medicine without a license, yet without your having any medical qualifications whatsoever?
And let's suppose you personally are 100% accurate. The next horary astrologer to come along, thanks to your encouragement, who lacks your expertise might mistakenly tell a woman who does have breast cancer that she's fine, and not to worry. So then she doesn't get herself checked out, and dies painfully over a period of a year.
Again, a Paulian lampoon. Why should anybody feel fine about somebody's burial? I just don't want a bunch of unqualified astrologers playing M.D. with people's life-and-death health issues. I do think medical astrology has merit, but analyses are very easily qualified. You can say, "It looks like you might have breast health issues, so make sure to keep up with routine screening if you are not doing this already."
So now we're getting into my "but" issues. I think you've been denying being "your brother's keeper." But in talking about how you can ethically help people through death predictions, this is precisely what you are doing.
You seem to feel that we're all a bunch of atomistic individual astrologers, free to go our own way. Well, yes: in one level we most certainly are. We are probably the most unregulated major counseling and predictive discipline on the planet. You want to predict death? How could I possibly stop you or anybody?
But rugged individualism is a culturally conditioned, point-in-time perspective. There's nothing objectively real about it. In other societies, the individual was/is not the relevant unit. It was the clan or the ethnic group or the loyal subjects. People took their identity from being a sub-set of a larger social group, not from distancing themselves from it. (In part, because it could have harmed their survival.)
I am all for individualism. But (and maybe I've been living in community-minded Canada too long) we equally have an obligation to consider the additional dimensions of our personhood. One of these is our obligations to the group. You seem to ignore who you are as a member of society.
To be continued....
