The way I see it, this documentary is making the claim that chemtrails are secretly everywhere and that's how they accomplish their goal of making us all sick or geoengineering the planet's climate, by being ubiquitous. It's definitely not claiming that chemtrails are these things that are done in fairly infrequent experiments or publicly declared local weather initiatives. Therefore the documentary appears to be misinformation or indeed deliberate disinformation to discredit the fact that these things exist and could potentially become ubiquitous in the future.
I'm not trying to make a straw man, I'm just saying that's the claim I'm always hearing. People pointing to your average white line in the sky and saying that's a chemtrail. That's what they do in this documentary, and they say it's obvious because they don't immediately disappear. Maybe they don't say it's most planes in the sky, but they imply it's a good proportion of them and it definitely includes commercial flights.
I'm sure they could be fitted to commercial planes but then we should see them, right? Or if they're hidden the people who work on the planes should be able to tell us about them. And there should be blueprints, instructions on changing them and other documents that would prove they exist. But so far I haven't found one credible document or whistleblower.
This is talking about planes specifically being flown to seed clouds. But the chemtrail conspiracy claim is that your average plane in the sky (i.e., commerical travel flight) is secretly emitting chemicals intended to cause harm or change the weather/climate.
How can someone be accountable if he never had any choice in the matter?
In other words you're asking "Then why does God still find fault? For who can resist His will?". If you're a follower of Paul's teachings you should get your answer from his response to that question. But if you're not content to believe Paul I suggest that minds should be punished for making choices that could cause harm. We should also stop machines that cause more harm than good, even destroying them if there is a risk of them being used again. We even refer to machines, plans and processes as bad or evil despite them not having any mind or free will.
Why is that bad under determinism and how is he guilty of being himself?
It's bad because child abuse and murder are bad things that we want to minimize. And he's guilty because he did bad things and is a depraved person. It doesn't matter why he is (pre-determined or not), the fact is that he is and that justifies punishment.
None of the Church fathers understood that passage to mean that some people were created for damnation.
Maybe because they weren't comfortable with what it actually says. It was and still is common for uncomfortable teachings to be ignored or reinterpreted.
God supplies grace for salvation, but damnation comes from the sinner’s own choices.
That sounds comforting, but unfortunately that's the very opposite of what the passage says. It's explained very plainly in black and white across all different translations and I don't have to be taught by a Calvinist to understand what it clearly says.
Saying truth is how things are is circular.
It's only circular if how things are is defined based on what is true. But I don't think we should define it like that.
How do you know how things are and how do you know your perception of "things" aligns with what's true?
This is a question I don't think anyone has been able to answer and I don't see how free will would help.
at no point do you make an evaluation and choose the true one over the false one.
You mean a non-deterministic evaluation. We still make deterministic evaluations and choices under determinism. But even if we didn't make any evaluations or choices and we just had beliefs planted into our minds I don't see how that makes them not beliefs or not justified (justification meaning there are other things known which prove that the belief is true).
You have no way of evaluating which one is true because your output is determined also - you're basically a calculator yourself.
Yet a computer can tell which one is true, so your reasoning here is wrong.
a determined output [would] stand on equal grounds as any other output.
Two computer programs for adding numbers can both be deterministic but that doesn't make them equally correct.
A mind without free will is a determined input-output mechanism though. At no point does it act on its own.
And your point is that therefore the mind isn't important? That's like saying the difference between a rock and a super-intelligent computer isn't important. Only worse because minds are immaterial and have subjective experiences while computers do not.
No free will necessarily leads to no moral accountability...that should be evident.
Citation needed. Philosophers don't agree on where morality comes from and likewise they won't be able to agree on where moral accountability comes from. And while most Christians would probably have your view that moral accountability is based on people having free will, Paul directly addresses the issue with the opposite answer:
One of you will say to me, “Then why does God still find fault? For who can resist His will?” But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to Him who formed it, “Why did You make me like this?” Does not the potter have the right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special occasions and another for common use? What if God, intending to show His wrath and make His power known, bore with great patience the vessels of His wrath, prepared for destruction?
Quite clearly here in Romans 9:19-23 he responds to your objection: How could God hold people morally accountable whose choices have been pre-determined by God? His answer is that God can do what he wants with his creation just like a potter can create a pot for the purpose of destroying it.
So not even your own apostle believes that free will is necessary for moral responsibility. Hence you were inappropriately conflating the two things.
Determinism usually assumes materialism. If you have another worldview then let's hear it. What other causes are there beside material causes and how are they justified?
Mental causes, logical causes, laws of the universe, and potentially divine intervention and other things outside the universe.
You still didn't point out which premise of my argument was wrong.
Knowledge of truth requires choice and evaluation
Motte and bailey fallacy. We weren't talking about knowledge of truth, just the existence of truth. And since you asked it's based on how things are. But I don't see why knowledge of truth would require free will. For example if knowledge is defined along the lines of justified true belief then none of those elements seem to require free will. You can believe something because your mind was deterministically put into that state of belief.
What is an emotion and what causes it?
Let's suppose it's a type of mental state and it can be caused by prior mental states and inputs to the mind through bodily senses. Where is free will required for this?
there's no meaningful distinction between what you call a human and the other causally determined instances of matter - dominos - in the universe
Not true because humans have minds and dominos do not.
You conflate free will with moral accountability. Arguing for/against one is not arguing for/against another. You also conflate determinism with materialism.
The part that's wrong is that you equivocate between primary and secondary causation.
My terms were clearly defined and primary and secondary causation were not terms I used.
truth necessitates a choice between the true and the false
No, truth is true regardless of whether any agent is capable of making choices.
Where is love in that equation?
Love could be defined as an emotion one feels or as a disposition one has towards a thing or as actions one does in service of a thing. None of those definitions would require free will.
You just agreed with my position (that God causing all the evil in the world doesn't make him evil) while claiming to be arguing against me.
Knowing something in advance doesn't make you the cause of it.
That was never my argument. My argument is this. If a non-deterministic action A makes outcome X a certainty when an alternative action B would have made not-X a certainty then A is the ultimate cause of X. If additionally A is performed by an agent who is aware that A will make X happen while B would have avoided X then the agent deliberately causes X. Therefore if God wasn't pre-determined to create a universe that certainly (as proved by his foreknowledge) led to evil (action A leading to X) and could have chose not to create (action B leading to not-X), but yet he did, it follows that God creating the universe was the ultimate cause of evil in the universe. Additionally God was aware this action would lead to evil in the universe while the alternative would have avoided it, so therefore God deliberately caused evil in the universe.
Which part of this argument is wrong? Notice I said nothing about causing evil being evil, God being morally accountable for causing evil or humans lacking accountability for their role in bringing the evil about.
Humans are secondary causal agents, meaning our will is separate from God's will and what we cause in the world is separate from God's causes.
You need to define what a secondary causal agent is. In a row of dominoes ending with a button you can call the second domino a "secondary causal agent" but it doesn't change the fact that if laws of physics are deterministic then the fall of the first domino causes the button to get pressed. Same thing if a general orders a soldier to kill someone - we say the general caused the death, regardless of the fact that there was a soldier who also caused the death and could have opted to disobey orders.
There's no love without free will
Citation needed. We all know people can love and make choices yet it is conceivable that these things happen via deterministic mental processes. If you say that a deterministic love cannot be love then you are simply defining love to be something that humans may not be capable of.
People who continually break the rules need to be banned. I thought this was what would happen but it appears that's not what has happened.
If we banned all the people who contribute nothing but insults then we would hardly need to delete comments for breaking rule 1. 95% of the insults come from 10% of the accounts and 2% of the actual users.
Aristotle presented an argument against free will from logic that is also worth considering, as described here: https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/freewill1.htm#ldeterminism
If God knew the future when he created the world then he created things knowing that they would devolve into evil. So then God purposely went ahead and caused all the evil in the world. Does that make God evil? I don't think so, because I think this decision could be justified by the good also caused, but most people aren't comfortable with God being the author of evil.
The idea that God merely permits evil doesn't make sense given that God set everything up knowing how it would turn out, meaning he actively caused everything we witness, not merely permitting it.
As to whether free will exists, that depends how you want to define it and what other things are true. See my top-level comment on this post.
Free will really needs to be defined in order to have a proper debate about.
For example, if you define free will to simply mean the ability to make "choices" and by a "choice" you mean to pick an option from a variety of possible options then even computers would have free will. If you instead define free will to mean the ability to make a choice in which you could have done otherwise, you need to define what "could have done otherwise" means. A computer could have done otherwise if it were programmed differently or it were hit by a cosmic ray that flipped one of its bits.
Often where this attempt to define free will ends up is with the idea that a person's choices are non-deterministic and thus even a being with perfect knowledge of everything in the present (physical, mental and otherwise) would be unable to know with certainty what choice (whenever you consider a choice really takes place) you will make a fraction of a second later. But this is a problem if you also want to believe the principle of sufficient reason: that nothing can happen without a sufficient reason. Abandoning the principle of sufficient reason you kind of need an alternative explanation for why things don't just constantly happen for no reason, like why doesn't an elephant just appear in my living room every 5 seconds? This idea of free will also appears incompatible with an all-knowing God who is able to interact in time. Because then God would know what choice you will make in the future and be able to tell that to people in the past, thereby contradicting the pre-established fact that no knowledge of things in the present would allow someone to know your choice ahead of time.
Another problem with this definition of free will is that there's an element of your choice that comes from absolutely nowhere for no reason, while any remaining elements of your choice are pre-determined. So which part of your choice comes from you without being predetermined? None of it does. Your choice is part random and part pre-determined, but none of it comes from some non-deterministic part of you.
Where did God declare it? The Bible in fact says the opposite that God has numbered all your days before you were born (Psalm 139), that he directs everyone's steps and the apparently random casting of lots (Proverbs 16) and that God creates people for the purpose of saving them or sending them to hell (Romans 9).
Note that free will is not the same as the ability to make choices or personal accountability. Romans 9 says that God holds people accountable even though their choices were predetermined (like the hardening of Pharaoh's heart by God). If one wishes to claim that a person's choices being predetermined entails that they are not morally accountable for their choices then this needs to be argued rather than assumed like free will proponents always do.
I didn't find this documentary convincing at all when I watched it a while ago. There's no evidence presented that anything is being spayed other than some alleged chemical tests of water and soil. But we have no idea how the water and soil got that way, whether it's from airplane spraying, ground spraying, contaminants in airplane fuels, nearby factories emitting things into the air or water, contaminants from household water supplies, problems with the collection method, problems with the testing method or anything else.
And of course they just repeat the claim that contrails always disappear very quickly as though that is proof of anything, even though this is obviously false because clouds are made of the same stuff (water vapor) and don't disappear quickly.
It's not clear to me if this is a photo of the woman (Esther Cohen-Tizer-Epstein) writing the letter or someone else like one of her daughters. Probably Esther though. Never heard of the Divine Madness cult before, but it has a Wikipedia page.
Thanks, looks like it's that since Epstein was giving money to that lab's director: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/23/132483/a-tumultuous-month-at-mit/
The American Dream (about money and banking): https://odysee.com/@BoundaryCrack:2/The-American-Dream:7
(For more detail but less entertainment is The Money Masters: https://odysee.com/@scoobyburn:1/DOC-The-Money-Masters-%281996%29:e)
Even if I agree with you I don't think think c/Conspiracies is the place for mudslinging posts
Sounds good, I look forward to it.