Genuine question: Is the issue you take that I criticized astrology, that I gave a throwaway carveout for religion, or both?

Both.

Does it though?

Yes, you are literally doing it right now.

It’s skirting dangerously close to sexism to call astrology “for women”, but I think the “seen as” part saves it.

It is absolutely not sexist to point out that things associated with women get more scrutiny and more criticism than things associated with men. Look inwards on this one. Astrology is a soft target for easy rationalism points and is criticised frequently by men as such.

Religion is a powerful tool for social control. It is not the material reason for social control. You’re talking about atrocities committed for land, resources, and power that were and are done under the banner of religion.

In which religion bears blame. Yes. You cannot pretend that the religious and their institutions did not participate in these crimes, and that they did not justify what they did using religion.

But at the same time, there were peasant uprisings in the name of religion as well that boiled down to “a saint visited me and told me that since class war is violent, we should kill the barons” (before Marx was around. They used the language of Christianity to express class war sentiments).

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of jacqueries. They were not class warfare in the traditional marxist sense. As Marx noted about a more literate and more aware peasantry closer to his own time, peasatry as it existed could not form a mass movement aware of its nature as a class, by coming together they do not form a unit distinct from the individual but become simply more of the individual thing, just as you cannot put enough potatoes in a sack to change their nature into anything but a sack of potatoes. Even during the Bundschuh movement and the subsequent peasant wars, the peasants did not at any point call for the overthrow or murder of the aristocracy, or in any way oppose them as a class. But sought a direct readressment of specific grievances, which included the Catholic church refusing to provide local priests to read the bible to the peasantry and leaving smaller churches empty to focus on the wealthy cities. They begged for proper aristocrats and a return to existing aristocratic feudal law, and a withdrawal of the excesses of the aristocrats to that of a mere generation ago. Because they had a belief, codified and passed down for centuries by the catholic church, that their subservient role was a part of the natural order that could not be changed and trying to was tantamount to blasphemy.
This was in part because the Catholic church existed and continues to exist to perform one function and that function is to maintain an existing social hierarchy for the benefit of the ruling class. Religion has a specific societal function too separate from that of the specific institution, to justify the unjustifiable, to give meaning to the meaningless and to soothe the pains of the souls that cannot otherwise be soothed. It is the opium of the people.

And you look at organisations that have murdered millions, kidnapped thousands from their parents and tried to systematically erase their culture, and ask people to believe that humans can speak to the dead, walk on water, and possibly that you can turn wine into literal blood by waving your hand over it and saying the magic words, and a group of people making star charts and say “Well only one of these things is worth condemning for its moral transgressions and irrationality and it ain’t the murderers”