Ray Alex Williams

Society will never ever see effeminate boys as “normal” no matter how much people try to “normalize” it. This is because we’re touching deep normative structures of what it means to be male: men are *supposed* to be masculine. This is a metaphysical fact, baked into human design.

Nondenominational megachurch pastor Gary Hamrick is “deeply concerned” many young men are being drawn to Catholicism, which he calls a “modern Judaizer movement” that preaches “Jesus plus.” He claims young men are being drawn to Catholicism because it provides “structure” and “boxes to check” to gain assurance of salvation. As a (relatively young) male Catholic convert myself, I can tell you he totally misses why young people are being drawn to Catholicism today. It’s not because we are searching for “structure” (though that’s part of it); it’s because we are seeking tradition and Apostolic succession. It’s because we long for continuity with the past and to root ourselves deeply in Church history. It’s because we want to be part of a 2,000 year old institution that was founded by the Lord Jesus Himself. It’s because we studied the Church fathers and did not find the watered down evangelical message of “faith alone” but instead found a deep reverence for the sacraments and especially the Eucharist as the Real Presence of our Lord Jesus Christ. It’s because we want revenant liturgy and ritual not Pastor Bob giving a 45 minute sermon. It’s because we long to be part of a global visible Church unified under the Bishop of Rome. It’s because we long for sacred beauty and transcendence, not mega churches without any sacred art and sentimental “praise and worship.” It’s because we want a Church that can and has stood doctrinally firm against the onslaught of liberalism and modernism. It’s because we long for a comprehensive and totalizing moral worldview that is internally coherent and systematically addresses the fundamental moral questions of modern secularism. It’s because we crave a sense of mystery and recognize the difference between the sacred and the profane. It’s because we see the fragmentation and disunity of the Protestant world and want to be part of the “one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic Church.” It’s because we appreciate the deep intellectual history of the Catholic Church. It’s because we long for a sacramental theology and not just watered down symbolism. It’s because we see the wisdom and beauty in following a liturgical calendar, not just whatever Pastor Bob feels like preaching on today. It’s because we feel drawn to the communion of saints. It’s because we recognize the need for a Spiritual Mother in the Blessed Virgin Mary. It’s because we recognize the importance of having a teaching Magisterium and not just private interpretation. It’s because Catholicism provides the structure and calling of vocation. But most of all, it’s because Catholicism is true.

@Sean_McDowell The unified subjective field of perspectival conscious awareness (“phenomenal consciousness”) wherein conscious subjects have a subjective “point of view” on reality, along with the intentionality of mental phenomena, generalizable abstract reason, and symbolic language.

QUESTION: What is the most difficult feature of reality for materialism (physicalism) to explain?

@ViJonjo That all may well be true but it doesn’t translate into a fundamental “right” to commit a mortal sin.

@RayAlexWilliams What if their blasphemy is part of their journey towards your God? What if censure would actually push them further off the path towards your God? What if your God were actually loving and forgiving, even towards His detractors?

Sorry, no, but there is no such thing as an intrinsic human right to blaspheme against the God of the Universe. That would be a misuse of human freedom.

@13virtueslover “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” ~ Pope John Paul II

@RayAlexWilliams God allows us to do this because of free will

I’ve seen a lot of people suggest there’s something inherently ethically suspect in how LLMs produce content e.g. AI is uniquely bad because of how LLMs are derivative from training data i.e. they “steal” human knowledge and creativity and this is uniquely wrong compared to other methods of information processing. And people will say this even if all the training data is ethically sourced. People have this deep hunch that content made by LLMs is uniquely wrong in some way. But frankly, I don’t buy it. At the end of the day, LLMs aren’t spooky or magic. They all ultimately boil down to an algorithm: a sequence of steps in manipulating information, like following a recipe. Before LLMs, people would use algorithms in photoshop to manipulate information or they’d use algorithms to analyze complex data sets to produce new information or they’d use another form of AI via machine learning or neural nets to do information processing. LLMs aren’t really anything new ontologically speaking; they’re simply based on a particular algorithm that surprisingly turned out to be incredibly useful at doing a lot of things humans care about. Ultimately, AI is a tool, as are all algorithms. A tool is neither good or bad in itself; it depends on how we use it. “But AI enables all these bad things!” So does the internet. Should we just get rid of the internet because people use the dark web to do heinous things? Or what about just computers in general? Think about all the harm that’s been caused from people using computers. This applies to any technology. Yes, one can argue that LLMs based on stolen data or artwork are unethical but I know many people who would in principle object to LLMs even if they were confident all the training data was collected ethically. I don’t understand this mentality. I use LLMs every day. They’re incredibly useful. It’s like a massive augmentation of my own mind. The philosopher Andy Clark calls this the “extended mind.” Think about how smartphones expanded the range of what we can do. LLMs are just another augmentation layer that happens to be very powerful. But because of its great power it can also be used for evil. And we need to be cognizant of that. But this whole Luddite mentality and moral outrage, I simply don’t resonate with.

“We are born with a noose around our neck; the sentence of death is passed upon us from the beginning.” ~ St. John Chrysostom

For what it’s worth I believe UAP phenomena are real, with real physical and psychological effects, but, also, that the best explanation for all the various data associated with the phenomenon is demons, not extraterrestrials visiting from other planets.

The functional and stereotyped mimicry of rational intelligence from pattern matching on training data ≠ true generalizable abstract reason found only in the immaterial rational soul of humanity

Being pro-life as a Christian necessitates being anti-gender ideology. Catholic anthropology says we are body-soul composites. Our embodiment as male or female is essential to our teleological structure as human beings. Our life as humans cannot be disentangled from the theology of the body, which is ordered towards the sexual purpose of procreation and unity between man and woman as one flesh. Gender ideology, in contrast, separates a subjective inner self from the body and says that the inner self is the core of our identity and the body is external to it, and can be manipulated in any way whatsoever to align with the desires of the inner self, even it these desires force us out of alignment with our teleological ordering towards procreation. But on Catholic anthropology, this is inconceivable and a remnant of ancient gnostic heresies. It is anti-Incarnational. Any attempt to modify, nullify, mutilate, or change the fundamental structure of our maleness or femaleness is essentially a rejection of God’s purposeful design for humanity, for each one of us. It should not be a suprise that all “gender affirming care,” whether hormones or surgery, disrupts and sterilizes people. It is an anti-life ideology at its core that only propagates through indoctrination. Furthermore, progressive Christianity teaches a false Gospel that says because God loves us, He thereby affirms the goodness of the “inner self” and its desires. But as St James teaches us, “God is never tempted to do wrong, and he never tempts anyone else. Temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away.These desires give birth to sinful actions. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death.” (James 1:13-15) We therefore cannot simply trust in our human understanding of our desires and infer that because God loves us and that Jesus died for our sins that God affirms every desire that comes forth from this “inner self.” Thus, we must align our desires, not with our will, but that of the Natural Law, which stems from our participation in the Eternal Law, which is reflected in the teleological structure embedded into the very nature of our being male and female body-soul composites ordered towards life.

What word is part of your regular vocabulary but frequently gets people accusing you of using “big words”? Mine would be: “ontological”

@ninaxsfw Begging trans activists to understand the principle of female only sports is to categorically exclude the STRONGEST of men from claiming a trans identity and competing, not necessarily the weakest, scrawniest male athletes, although both must be excluded on the same principle.

according to twitter users I could easily beat this record in the womens category since I'm trans

@mushycrouton Translation: conservative young men are actually taking seriously the teachings of the Christian, Biblical worldview which has been held fast by every orthodox Christian for 2,000 years, a worldview which is now deem “homophobic” by modern liberal secular activists.

“Gender critical” ideology has stoked a moral panic over the last few years. They won’t stop with trans people. They’re going to go after gay people too.

This book is being advertised on my kindle. Women, are y’all ok?