How is believing in astrology without evidence really that different from believing in God without evidence?

I ask this in all sincerity:

What is going on with cases such as this?:

It’s so ironic or absurd that it’s hard for me to take it at face value. It is just outright fraud, a kayfabe? But then I’d be asking about the customers.

But no, I think it’s sincere. He really does think that newspaper daily horoscope sun sign astrology is bullshit, but that the key is to be more precise and authentic and to do what is “scientifically proven”.

Just like he is presumably applying what he regards as an elevated epistemic norm to “information on aliens, UFO, conspiracies and secrets of some ancient knowledge”.

Is this a kind of mental illness? Religion gone astray? Just an ordinary person of sincere curiosity who managed to study one thing deeply while remaining (willfully?) ignorant of all the things we know that rule out that path?

I have been exposed to such things all my life. I watched “In Search Of” and read “Chariots of the Gods”. But by the time I was 13 years old it was clear what was real and what was nonsense. And that was while immersed in the whole bizarre 1970s cultural fascination with such woo.

I don’t see how a psychologically normal adult with exposure to western culture can persist doggedly down a manifestly absurd path. (The one thing that actually does manifest!)

What’s going on in such people? Is it so different than what goes on in MAGA culters? Christian literalists? Those confound me too.

I get the curiosity. And desire for order and meaning. I can see how those things make you become a mathematician, physicist, or analytic philosopher. I don’t see how it can persist for more than a few weeks in this empirically solidly bogus direction.