As far as New Ageism and the occult are concerned, most people have their own pre-conceived stereotypes, and I don't blame them. You only have to flick to the back of a magazine to see the "fortune tellers" with their thick black fringes and black cats to see just how ridiculously the occult portrays ITSELF, never mind how other people portray it.
Anyway when I was younger I learnt a lot about the lost art of palmistry and even though I ditched the rest of the occult on becoming Christian, it's something I refuse to let go because I don't personally believe that there is anything wrong with it and here I shall justify why.
The Bible condemns fortune telling, spell casting, contacting the dead etc. Not because these things don't work but because people can have bad experiences when they experiment too much with things that are so much more powerful than themselves. It's like telling your child not to play with fire. Chances are, if they do they'll get burnt and it's the same with much of the occult. If you don't conjure up negative energies of some sort then you'll fall prey to what Christians refer to as "Satan" in some other way, perhaps charging people for your services and becoming a greedy con-artist, using the occult for wealth and power.
However, although palm-reading is often seen as "fortune telling", that isn't what it is. Yes, telling somebody that they are about to die is probably not a very good idea. However, that is pseudo-palmistry, and the true palmists know that using one's hands to tell the future is not what palm-reading is about and should be ignored.
Palmistry is all about using the lines and shape of someone's hands and fingers to give the reader an insight into the hand-owner's personality. They can provide a vivid picture about someone's emotional state, passions and issues which may hold them back if they are not dealt with. They can tell you about someone's ability to hold relationships, how big their ego is and whether they are prone to depression. For me, seeing my personality written in my hands does not challenge my faith, it affirms it. If God exists, which I believe He does, then He is a precise God who loves detail. You only need to look at the world around you to realise just how fine-tuned and perfect it is. Read this to see what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio . Hard to get your head around but bloody brilliant. Anyway, yes, God likes detail to the point where EVERYTHING in the world is connected in ways which are too perfect for coincidence. Doesn't it make sense then, that if God is so perfect and detail-obsessed, that he would give us these lines on our hands for a reason? That maybe they are not just useless lines and that maybe, just as everyone's personality is unique, so are everyone's hands and that there is a relationship between the two? I don't see reading about one's personality in one's palms as fortune telling. I see it as breaking a code written by God, just in the same way as the members of the Human Genome Project were breaking the code of life, palm-readers are breaking the code of the human soul.
Yes, hands can be used to tell the future, but they shouldn't be. Telling the future causes all manner of upset and fuss. But merely reading what you already know is harmless as far as I'm concerned, as long as no money is changing hands.
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