they can't answer why it is the case and how they know that without being ad hoc or circular.
But nothing can be self-evident and everything needs to be justified.
But then you can't have any knowledge. There has to be a starting point which isn't properly justified. We already have these starting points within our minds so we may as well just be explicit about them instead of pretend everything we think has some justification. Your starting point is that it's OK for you to kill babies? Great, but we're going to judge you according to our standards, not yours.
Maybe the creator is the evil demiurg of the Gnostics? Maybe ...
You think these are good explanations for the way things are? No, of course not. The fact people can come up with dumb theories doesn't tell us that we can't work anything out for ourselves. You still do work stuff out for yourself, which is how you arrived at your views. You're no different from everyone else trying to figure stuff out and judging other people's views to be wrong. You think Orthodox Christianity makes the most sense of things - cool but lots of people judge you to be wrong. You think the Christian Bible is God's explicit revelation - cool but lots of people think it's some other collection of books. Nature is the only thing that everyone who believes in a creator can agree is the work of the creator. So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims?
All objective morality has to appeal to some standard. And then the question of "Why is that the standard?" shows that it likewise is in some sense relative. You can answer that question with some reasons, like God having authority to decide what is moral in his creation, but it never disproves other standards of morality which are justified by other reasons, such as the atheist's "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral".
Yet again, the problem is trying to justify everything from first principles. It's impossible because it will always go back infinitely, use circular logic or go back to something unjustified. Instead it makes more sense to base things on what is unprovable yet intuitively obvious, like other people having agency, some actions being wrong, and that wrong actions by those with agency should be punished.
That is in fact what everybody does, looking into their conscience, and to the extent one looks to an outside source for morality, it is rarely to go completely counter to one's conscience. Hence why Christians deep down don't believe slavery as practiced in the Bible is A-OK, don't believe children who curse their parents deserve death, don't believe it's ever OK to kill a whole city including women and children (or capturing the women for soldiers to have), and don't think it's normally a good idea to give a woman to her husband's brother or a man who raped her. Likewise I judge nature by my conscience while also trying to learn what is good from nature.
And if we trust our consciences (and we all do) we need an explanation for why they are trustworthy. The obvious explanation is that they were meant to guide us, being given to us by the creator(s). And then it only makes sense that the creator would have a similar sense of morality to our consciences, and being the source of our consciences is a more reliable measure of what is moral - for we know our consciences do not always agree. And knowing this creator also made other people's consciences, as well as the whole of nature, it follows that we can get closer to the creator's morality by studying the consciences of others and the things of nature, which appear to be made for our benefit, given how so many of them are good for our health in contrast to artificial things.
Hume's is/ought problem assumes that things are the way they are for no reason. If instead you assume things are the way they are for a reason (which is intuitively obvious) then the way things are can potentially tell you about what ought to be (although we haven't defined what "ought" means). Specifically, if you assume that things were created by intelligent design for some purpose (that everything happened by chance for no reason is literally retarded, putting deductive logic and epistemology aside because then you literally can't prove anything) then it makes sense that we might be able to discern some of the purpose and principles behind the design, and we might decide to call things in line with those principles and ultimate purpose how things "ought" to be.
Is it subject to interpretation? Yes. Does that mean any interpretation is legitimate and there are no right or wrong answers? No. It's like trying to estimate the mean of a population and other characteristics of it from a sample. There are correct answers even if we don't know what they are, and there are rational methods which will give us a decent estimate of the correct answer from what we can observe. These methods are not irrational and arbitrary, which is why virtually every culture in history (that I've heard of) has inferred the existence of a creator(s) despite not directly observing one (until rationalism came along).
Man has a natural ability to interpret nature even if it's not always correct. Neither is the conscience always correct, nor our intuitions, nor is nature always good. Hardly anything is always correct or known for certain, which is why man has an ability to work with fuzzy logic and why it was wrong to try to prove everything deductively from first principles. It would be nice if things were that easy, but God apparently doesn't want to make it too easy and wants us to figure stuff out the hard way, which would explain why he keeps himself hidden and doesn't interact with us directly. The way God guides us is through life and nature that he has designed, and these teach us to learn and develop ourselves so we can overcome challenges, not expect someone or something else to have all the answers and always be there to rescue us.
And yet the species that eat their progeny are in the minority and even among those species I think it's normally only done in somewhat extreme or unusual circumstances. Not everything in nature is good, but there are definitely general rules that nature follows and those are usually a good guide which also give us a window into the mind of the creator. The creator has also given us a conscience, rationality and intuitive common sense by which to discern what is right.
Public health experts say that pandemics are only going to become more frequent and more deadly.
Well they would say that because their whole careers are spent worrying about pandemics and their continued employment is also pretty dependent on the fear of pandemics. But what are their actual reasons for thinking pandemics will get worse? Is sanitation going down, are people socialising more, travelling more, having sex more, having sex with animals more or eating more questionable foods? Of course most of these are actually going down and the rest aren't particularly on the rise, so pandemics should be getting less frequent and deadly. Especially with improving technology as our savior, like mRNA and modRNA vaccines. So what justifications do the "public health experts" point to? This video provides some suggestions - "misinformation" and distrust of authorities and vaccines. Because the COVID "pandemic" was obviously caused by misinformation and distrust of authorities, right?
I suspect they're right though that "pandemics" will get more frequent and deadly, but not for those reasons. The reasons will be more gain of function research and use of bioweapons, weakened immune systems from lack of social contact, pollution and poison drugs/vaccines, and perhaps most importantly because COVID proved they could exaggerate any minor infectious disease into a "pandemic" and get whatever they want by declaring a state of emergency.
No need to be rude. I did already tell you what the direct evidence is for a couple of them, which you could look up.
In Fauci's emails one of his aides draws his attention to their funding of EcoHealth Alliance in relation to the origin of Sars-CoV-2 and Fauci had meetings with a number of other people like Jeremy Farrar about the origin and some of them expressed by email that there's no way it could have been of natural origin but then a few days later signed the Lancet statement that it was zoonotic. Is that 100% proof it came from the lab? No, but it's direct evidence that not only did Fauci and co know it likely came from a lab with their funding and that their public statements did not represent their actual views or knowledge, implying they were covering up the truth.
The moderna patent containing the exact sequence which supposedly evolved naturally in Sars-CoV-2 is also strong evidence from primary sources of collusion between Moderna and the creation of the virus, even if there's a 1 in a trillion chance the two sequences matched by chance. Ralph Baric receiving vaccine candidates is further direct evidence.
Do I have to go through all the other conspiracies I mentioned?
There absolutely was direct evidence of those claims but you're muddying the waters by saying there also needs to be an admission of malicious intent. There's a clear difference between "this primary source says X" and "this primary/secondary source is best explained by X".
With the pyramids the primary source is how the stones are laid which doesn't tell you what technology was used and you have to use inference to the best explanation, which is often wrong and the two of us can't even agree on the best explanation yet.
Hard to choose only 3. COVID had a bunch, like the virus being from the Wuhan lab with US funding but covered up as revealed in Fauci's emails, collusion with vaccine manufacturers as indicated by the furin cleavage site's exact sequence in 2016 Moderna patent and Ralph Baric receiving vaccine candidates in December 2019, fatality of the virus obviously exaggerated, positive cases deliberately inflated, vaccines safe and effective and so on. Earlier ones include the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Phoebus cartel, the creation of the Federal Reserve and the secret societies around Cecil Rhodes.
I'm not saying the mainstream history is correct. I don't think they are good at dating things.
And no, you can’t just use “a lever” (made out of what?) on Saharan sand (yes, it’s all they have) to lift hundreds of tons without constructing a massive, modern foundation and mooring system (i.e. concrete).
I said the lever could be made out of stone columns bound together. The pivot can be made of stone too and if it sinks into the sand too much then put it on a wide base. Not exactly easy but that's the simplest way I can think of. Maybe they found a better way but I don't see any direct of evidence of sophisticated technology.
For sand the weight just has to be distributed over a larger area, no? And I don't think Egypt is loose sand everywhere, although I've never been. I think to accomplish what they did they probably had the wheel or something like it like logs for rolling things on.
I reckon they may only have needed a very strong lever, strong ropes and a strong wheeled platform in order for a bunch of slaves to lift and move large rocks. I don't know what the official story is but I'm guessing it was something along those lines. A lever capable of lifting such large weights would be very heavy itself, but it could have been deconstructed for transport and assembled where it was needed, e.g. multiple stone columns that could be bound together. Strong ropes could also be made from many ropes wound together and many wheels under a platform would allow it to bear greater weights. What else would they need?
I don't know much about masonry, so can you explain why this level of precision is remarkable? We have ancient statues with much more precise shapes going back allegedly 6000 years, including hard materials like marble. This article includes an ancient illustration of how Egyptian sculptors did their work, appearing to use stones to chisel away: https://www.thecollector.com/classical-art-marble-sculpting/. That article says for hard materials they used the same material to sculpt it. Couldn't that be how it was done in architecture as well if not with metal tools?
The public may be retarded but we can't just ignore them or replace them. These are the tools we've been given and we have to make do. At least they're not as retarded as they could be and most do have some common sense.
Sure, although I don't know when I'll get around to this given all the other books I want to read.
There have been a lot of other people/systems claiming to have/confer special abilities but almost all of them have proved to be frauds, likely frauds or simply impossible to verify or falsify. This one has more evidence going for it since there has allegedly been some independent scientific investigation and independent video recordings, plus the abilities may not have been specific to one guy with unusual biology. But I guess with Chang dead and only a handful of students who didn't appear to reach his level or submit themselves to similar tests it will be very difficult to verify.
That sounds almost like becoming as bad as your enemies. And how can you expect to win without the public on your side? The powers that be win by getting the public on their side through manipulation, not simply pushing them aside. I don't think ends normally justify the means however so I rule out manipulation or abuse of the public unless it's something minor with a much bigger payoff for the public.
OK thanks. Do you know why students thought it was OK to write books about it when Chang didn't think it should be made public? Have the students ever been open to scientific testing? It seems from the OP that Dervenis wants to understand how it works and would be open to running tests? Did anything like that happen?
Of course I left out the reasons Chang changed his mind, but that's because if we're investigating whether this stuff is for real we have to wonder whether Chang just made excuses for his change of mind. They would be convenient excuses as they are unverifiable. They do however mess with Chang's image as someone who has meditated long and hard before making a decision, especially as he knew he was going against his master before he got the dream.
Interesting, but odd how he said his stuff was to be kept secret yet at the same time he would show it off with no cameras. And for someone who meditates and works on self-discipline so much he changes his mind a lot about whether he should be allowing his abilities to be published on video. And it was a little suspicious he decided he wouldn't be able to do scientific tests once they finally started figuring out how to measure his energy. A lot of the time he appears to be showing off like a magician rather than someone safeguarding a secret tradition or reserving his abilities only for useful activities. He is apparently modern in most ways and not super traditional, so he could be aware of modern technologies that would help with magic tricks.
Did any of his students ever get any powers? This is the first I have heard of John Chang or Mo Pai so I don't know but I didn't yet find if any students claim to have developed any observable special abilities.
I wasn't aware of that movement in the 70's-80's but they were right to oppose digitization and manufacturing pollution (real pollution as you say, not CO2). But I don't think terrorism tends to win supporters so I suggest winning hearts and minds instead until there is large opposition to the technology. Sabotage can still be done discreetly by those who work in certain fields and strikes are fine too.
Except you keep appealing to it and saying everything needs to be justified.
The majority have consciences that function according to God's principles, that is my point.
So as I said you're no different to everyone else who has to argue for their views and argue against others. You didn't mention the Bible as part of this process because it doesn't prove anything unless one already accepts its veracity. On the other hand if one believes in a creator then nature is already accepted to be from the creator and then one either has to accept the wisdom of nature or provide reasons for why they reject it. Christians reject it because they have a story of how nature became corrupted, but they have no evidence for this story so it amounts to an unjustified rejection.
But I never argued that nature means the same thing to all these people. My argument is that the natural world or universe (planets, plants, animals and so on) was made by the creator, and almost everyone believed that before philosophy sought absolute proof of everything and found God (along with everything else) can't be absolutely proven. Therefore we can learn about God through the natural world, which came from God, rather than anything else of which we have no good evidence God is the proximate cause. Yes there are different ways of extracting knowledge from nature which lead to bad and contradictory conclusions, but this doesn't invalidate my claim and that some ways are better than others.