xstemsy

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

Every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness, - 2 Timothy 3:16

If you are a Christian, or have any interest in Christianity, even purely academic, you will need to read the Bible.

It is far from an impossible task, but it is also not a trivial one. The Bible is a bit under 50% larger than the entire Lord of the Rings, plus the Hobbit. At least if I ask someone to read The Lord of the Rings, it has the decency to be visibly 4 books. "The Bible" sounds like one book.

It is not. It is many books, bound together. "Reading the Bible" is more like reading an entire rather large series.

It takes a bit of planning to do it. If you have the motivation to simply start at the beginning and proceed to the end, that's fine, but it isn't necessarily the best way.

The way I recommend is to follow a plan that not only breaks it up into a daily plan for a year, but also breaks the readings up into four separate streams. You can see such a plan linked here (https://t.co/AQp25yhvXw).

If you have not read the Bible, it is very unlikely that you know what is in it. It is far from just a list of commands or just a big list of who had what son.

However, it does have those things in it, and when you hit them on one stream it is very helpful to have the other streams to break those up.

I'm also going to do this for you: When you hit a big set of who had what son, or a big list of how many people there were in what army, or the boundary of what land belongs to which ancient Israeli tribe, or things like that, I give you permission to skip over them. They are there for a reason and there are many interesting nuggets to be gleaned from them, but I invite you to go ahead and consider that more advanced study.

It isn't necessary to understand everything on the first reading. It isn't even possible, so don't worry about the impossible. However a basic knowledge of what is in there will do you good and is extremely helpful for any future study.

I also strongly recommend that you pair this reading with the Bible Project videos I mentioned before ( Old Testament (https://t.co/0ikuSgbTxp), New Testament (https://t.co/n3j8meC5Zk)). There's a video for each book, and sometimes, parts of a book. When you start a new book, watch the video for it. Maybe review it again as you leave a book. This is won't completely open up everything that is going on, but it will help keep you oriented in the denser parts of the Bible. It is virtually guaranteed that you will get lost if you just plow through. Don't feel bad about reviewing them more than once for some of the denser books.

Finally, just keep at it. The plan has calendar days on it. If you are the sort who will find that sort of guide useful then don't let me distract you from it, but I also recommend just making steady progress. If you miss a day and you 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 to catch up, I won't stop you. But I honestly recommend just ignoring the day indications. Don't let a "backlog" build up. Just take it one day at a time.

Like I said, if you have not read it at all, you will be surprised by what it actually has in it. Most people's ideas casually picked up from culture are either completely incorrect, or very incomplete.

#xstemsyEncouragement

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/10/the_utility_of_bible_study/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

One of the reasons I am putting these posts on X (among other places) is that I want to take advantage of its automatic translations to spread the message around the world.

However, when it comes time to discuss Christian terminology, it causes a problem, because the very word I want to discuss is going to be translated as well. If you are reading this in something other than English, Christians who speak your language may well have other terms they use and I have no idea if the translation will match their usage or not.

I'll also be addressing misconceptions about the terms that I 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 exist in English. The misconceptions may not exist in your language, but certainly the correct definition will apply.

Today I want to define "sin". Spelling that in a way that I hope will pass through translation somehow, those are the English letters S, I, N.

In a culture that understands the concept of sin, you can squeeze the main message of the Bible into "You are a sinner and you need Jesus to fix the resulting problems", and some sort of meaning will be successfully transferred from the speaker to the listener. In a culture that has no idea what the meaning of the word is, whether because it lost it or it never had it, that sentence does nothing.

Sometimes I wonder which more people could correctly describe, the concept of "sin" in the bible, or the nature of the primary monster of the Final Fantasy X video game with the same name (https://t.co/lm2VRlEOvq). In some countries I'm sure it would be the latter.

The general meaning of the term is that it is an offense against God, or it is an act that has crossed the boundaries as set by God. In this sense is a noun. A lie is a sin. A murder is a sin. You can "have" sin, as a noun, which is the state of having committed a sin.

It can also refer to the state of having one or more sins. A "sinner" is one who has sinned. This person is in a "state of sin".

This is the literal meaning. But to truly understand it requires connecting it to some other elements of Christian theology. I think that isolated from the rest of the context it may sound like it isn't a big deal. So you did something that in God's opinion is bad. Is that really a problem? It certainly isn't a big deal if you do something that in my personal opinion is bad. Who cares what some guy on the internet thinks of your actions?

But God is not just some Guy who has an opinion. It's not even that He is some Guy with an Opinion who is very powerful, so we better make sure to pay attention so He doesn't decide to hurt us. He is Good, in every way. He wants good outcomes for you. His laws lead to goodness. In His infinite understanding of everything from the beginning to the end, he knows what will lead to goodness, and what leads to things that are not goodness.

So the important aspect of the word "sin" is not just that some guy told you not to do X, but you did X, and now he's angry.

The important aspect of "sin" is that every sin is hurt. It hurts you. It hurts others. It hurts God. It hurts the physical world.

It is true that God is angry at sin, but it's not just because he made arbitrary rules and you violated them. His rules are the opposite of arbitrary. They were the rules to avoid hurting God and people, and by breaking them, you have hurt God and people, including yourself as one of the people.

That is why sin is such an important concept in Christianity. A violation of an arbitrary rule can be ignored just as arbitrarily. The hurt that the sin results in can not be ignored. That is not Justice. Your sins must be dealt with precisely because they are not the arbitrary breaking of arbitrary rules, but because from a perspective that takes all of infinite eternity into account, you have done real harm. You have done real harm even from our tiny perspectives.

You and I are sinners, and that is a big problem.

#xstemsyChoice

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/10/what_is_sin/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

As with anything that exists... and if there is anything that Exists, it is the Being who is the only thing to be self-existent, not requiring any previous thing to exist... God has characteristics.

Some of those characteristics are very famous, such as omniscience - knowing everything there is to know. Or omnipotence - having the power to do anything.

Others are less well known, such as God as Healer.

Some are difficult for us to understand outside of a Christian context, such as God's Holiness.

Some might just sound mysterious, like God's Immutability. As beings embedded in time, the idea of a being that "doesn't change" sounds very strange to us. To quote the great philosopher Fry from Futurama, "Existing is basically all I do!" (https://t.co/WnSkOwH2zI), and for us, to exist is to change.

Christians have found all sorts of different characteristics of God in the Bible. But rather than a dry recitation of them, I want to use them as a lens to look at why the choice of God to pay the price for sin by sacrificing Himself for us fits into his character and characteristics.

As that introduction has burned through a good portion of the word budget I allocate for these posts, let me take what seems to be a simple one to start with: God's Mercy. God is repeatedly described as merciful throughout the Bible. To take just one example:

He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor repaid us for our iniquities. - Psalms 103:10

On the face of it it should be obvious how God's Mercy leads to his choice to take on the price of sin for us.

And sometimes the simple answer is the best answer. I don't want to overcomplicate it. God wishes to extend mercy to us.

But even this simple view still leaves a couple of obvious questions:

• Why does this require such a heavy price to be paid?
• Why is this only extended to those who accept it? Why not everyone?
To fully understand God is the task of eternity. One of the biggest mistakes people make in their very first step of understanding Him is to try to consider His attributes one at a time, and appeal to them without considering the other attributes He has at the same time. "A God of Mercy would or would not do this." "A God of Love would or would not do some other thing." But God is not a "God of Mercy" or a "God of Love"; He is a God of all of His attributes at once.

God does not Love in a way that will violate his Justice. God does not give Mercy in a way that will violate his Truth. And so on, for all of his attributes. It is beyond us to perfectly demonstrate all these attributes at once. It is beyond us to perfectly understand the demonstration of all of these attributes at once.

It is plausible that a god of mercy would not need to come down and pay a price for us we could not pay. A god of mercy might simply wave away the violations and forgive them without cost to anyone. But that god of mercy would be necessarily lacking in other characteristics that God has.

As young as eternity is yet, it is possible that the Crucifixion of Jesus is one of the most important events that will ever occur. Certainly it is the most important that has yet occurred for humanity up to this point. That makes this a good lens to study the characteristics of God through; why this decision? Why not some other? Why this exact way?

The answers come back to the nature of who God is.

#xstemsyCall

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/09/god_s_characteristics/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

Why is it interesting that the Bible is like a hologram (https://t.co/McyvAYx3oh)?

With my personality, I would personally prefer in some sense that the Bible be organized like a textbook:

• The Beginning Of The Universe
• Humanity's Problem
• The Solution To Humanity's Problem
• The Cosmology of the Universe
• How the Earth Was Created (With Pictures)
• The Structure Of Heaven
• Ethics: Honesty
• Ethics: Courage
• Demons: A Field Guide
And so on. Need an answer, look it up in the correct section. Like a User's Manual for life, or a textbook.

No one writes a "holographic" user's manual, where the entire manual is a complex tapestry of all the things you might want to know, but none of them laid out in one place clearly. That would be insane for a technical document.

But there's a problem with that structure. A modern textbook is written by a small group of people and published by one company. No modern textbook author has any hope of their textbook surviving across thousands of years.

But God designed the Bible to last across thousands of years.

Moreover, the Bible is designed to go into a hostile environment. No textbook author has to worry about people deliberately miscopying their texts, and then someone else miscopying those, and then someone else inserting their own agenda into it, and so forth. Yes, there's a few textbooks that become contentious and maybe this happen just a smidge to a few, but a few years later and those textbooks are gone anyhow.

If it were designed the way I want it, with clear sections, it would be very easy to corrupt over centuries. Does someone want to change the Ethics of Honesty? All they have to do is rip that section out and write a new one.

It isn't that hard to rip a chunk out of a conventional image and put a new one in. We have off-the-shelf computer programs for that.

It is effectively impossible to do that to a hologram on a large scale. You can easily cut a bit of it out. But the rest of the hologram still has a lot of the missing information. Jamming something new in there also sticks out. It becomes very difficult to integrate something truly new into the whole without it being detectable.

Detection is all you can ask for. The attempts to corrupt will occur. There have been many rewrites of the Bible and they continue to this day. But what I'm observing here is that they have to come as either complete front-to-back rewrites, or the creation of completely new supplementary material that is accompanied by some pronouncement by an authority figure that it simply supersedes the Bible. It's very difficult to just snip this bit out or slide this new thing in to the Bible undetected. I say "very difficult" and not, strictly speaking, impossible, on purpose. But it is very difficult.

#xstemsySearch

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/09/the_holography_of_the_bible_as_defensive_measure/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

The world is a nasty place. But we often forget this for a time. We have never seen a perfect place to measure against it. We can't think all the time about all the evil in the world. The only people that wouldn't drive insane are those who are already insane.

But we can also build up too many defenses against the nastiness of the world. We must at least let it penetrate into ourselves enough that we realize there is a problem. The often-forgotten first step of solving a problem is realizing a problem exists in the first place. It is not a solution to either our own problems or the world's problems to cauterize our own ability to recognize problems.

We particularly must face our own nastiness. I'm going to write about the problems the world has too, because the external problems the world has are also part of the case for Christianity, and part of the story Christianity tells to make sense of the world. But the problem that Christianity is truly concerned about isn't the problems everyone else has. It is the problems you have, in yourself. You can't fix everyone else. No matter how loudly you yell at them or hit them. You can only fix yourself.

It is uncomfortable to gaze inward. Our minds are expert at preparing rationalizations and excuses for it. But it is necessary to look inside and see what is really there.

For with whatever judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you. - Matthew 7:2

Nobody lives up to even their own ethical standards, let alone the loftier ones necessary to create a truly perfect person or society.

Both the internal and the external issues come from the same place in the end, so understanding either one leads to understanding the other.

I am not baffled by the evil in the world. I see it in my heart.

Obviously, when we look inside, we won't all find the exact same thing. But you will at the very least find seeds. Some of those seeds will have grown. Where some people have a forest you may have only a shrub, but the shrub understands where the forest came from, for the shrub is also much larger than its seed.

Left unchecked, that shrub will become a forest. And what you may judge a little tiny growth God may judge much larger with his measure of perfection.

#xstemsyProblem

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/09/the_world_clearly/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

I am young.

From a human perspective, this is not true. I'm middle aged now. Being older than middle aged is in sight.

But from the perspective of a being who will never cease to exist, I'm quite young.

In fact, little pop quiz for you: What percent of your existence have you used up?

I don't need to make any complicated calculations based on your age, your birth, your expected time before the body reading this dies. It's the same for everyone.

It's 0%.

In fact, it never budges from 0%. You'll never hit 1%. The progress bar of your existence never so much as twitches.

Nevertheless, even by the standards of the young, I am particularly young, because I'm still in my first body. I am still laboring under

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known. - 1 Corinthians 13:12

My information diet has been medically restricted by the Great Physician.

And down inside, I have the petulance of a toddler in me.

I want everything now. I want all my prayers answered now. I want all the evil stopped right now. Maybe in the next five minutes if I'm feeling patient, but why wait? I want God to just show up for all of us and show us all about Heaven and Hell right now, and let people chose that way,

"He said to him, 'If they don't listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if one rises from the dead.'" - Luke 16:31

notwithstanding.

If I pray for healing, I want it fully healed and done now. If I pray for God to improve me in some way, I want it done now.

I'm not just saying this to make a point here... this is something I've struggled with.

But as I approach the tail end of "middle age", I am slowly learning that many things I want to be points in time are actually processes from my time-bound point of view.

The biggest example of this is that if you lived in the 400 years before Jesus came in Israel, you would probably hope and expect that the Messiah would come, and in a moment fulfill all his promises. In a short period of time Israel would go from a vassal state to the ruler of the world with God crushing all their enemies.

Instead: Jesus was born, but was fairly quiet from a historical perspective for nearly 30 years. Then He slowly grew His ministry over about 3 years. Then there was the Crucifixion and Resurrection, which feels pretty quick, even if it was a couple of days. And you might think things would really get going after that...

But instead, there was an interim time while he intermittently visited some of His disciples. Then a waiting period for Pentecost. Then, while from a historical perspective the Church experienced explosive growth, I suspect in the moment it often still felt very slow, as they were chased from Jerusalem by persecution.

Not only was the Messiah's redemption of the world in the time He was on the Earth a process, it is a process that is still ongoing.

When I pray for God to help me with my pride, I am slowly coming to expect it to be a process, an extended series of events, rather than a single event.

While I believe miraculous and sudden healings do occur, I also realize that a lot of prayers for healings are answered as processes.

God isn't working on the time frame the petulant child that I am wants, and that's because His way is better. He works in the world so often through processes. Decades and centuries are nothing for him who knows the end from the beginning.

There are many lessons you could draw from this but the one that I find most impactful is the impact on prayer. God already wants you to come to him persistently, but I've come to see most of my prayer, especially in its capacity as making petitions of and intercessions before God, as applying steady pressure over time rather than a moment's burst. I need to pray in a corresponding manner, with persistence, not in little bursts.

#xstemsyMaturity

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/09/young_dumb_and_probably_don_t_look_so_good_either/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

Christians are called to strive to lead exemplary lives. We don't get to "take advantage" of God's grace to do whatever we want.

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? May it never be ! We who died to sin, how could we live in it any longer? - Romans 6:1-2

We are promised that we will always have the power to overcome temptations, and that God will be with us:

No temptation has taken you except what is common to man. God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able, but will with the temptation also make the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. - 1 Corinthians 10:13

Yet, at the same time, we are also promised that we will still fail. Our evil nature is still with us and it will still win sometimes, and we will fail.

If you are reading this as a non-Christian, please bear this in mind. We will trip, stumble, and fall. Anyone who claims to be Christian and claims that they won't trip is disproving their claim even as they make it. Making that false claim is itself an error.

If we say that we haven't sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. - 1 John 1:10

For Christians who do stumble, the forces of darkness are right there to use that against you. Especially for errors you make on a recurring basis. They will tell you it's time to give up, that God doesn't love you, that you'll never overcome this problem so why try?

How does a Christian deal with stumbling?

I like to think of it like this:

It's OK.

It's not OK.

But it's OK.

"It's OK" means: God still loves you. He still wants you to be His child. Your error is not the end of your relationship.

"It's not OK" means: It is still an error. It is a bad thing. The fact that God still loves you doesn't mean you get to just keep making errors over and over without trying to address it. It's still an error, and it will still have whatever consequences it may have. This must not be simply waved away like it is of no consequence.

"But it's OK" means: Even so, above all else, God still loves you. He will forgive you. Turn to him, and "go forth and sin no more", to the best of your ability.

It's OK. It's not OK. But it's OK.

#xstemsyEncouragement

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/09/it_s_ok_it_s_not_ok_but_it_s_ok/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

It's hard to notice things that aren't happening.

So if you've been reading through since the beginning, or following me for a while, you may not have noticed that I have a policy of trying to avoid certain Christian terms. Especially if you're reading this through a translation, or you don't know anything about Christian terminology.

From about the 1600s to the 1800s, the United States was a sufficiently Christian country that everyone knew at least something about the terminology of Christianity.

Much of the terminology was also normal day-to-day terminology. For instance, several of the terms come from accounting. When one doesn't have a computer doing it all for you, accounting is a bigger part of one's life, so accounting terminology that is obscure today was much more common. Others words were still in common use, and the common usage was obviously related to the Christian meanings.

I think a lot of Christians in the United States today who try to speak to the rest of their culture have not noticed that this moment has passed. The terms used only by Christians are not understood by the general public. There are also words still in general use, but that have specific Christian meanings, and those meanings are also generally dead. Above, I limited the time that people generally knew about the Christian meanings of words to the 1800s, because I think even by the 1960s those meanings were no longer all that common, let alone the present.

When we go out to the world and tell everyone about the thing represented by the English letters S, I, N, I don't think the people are ignoring us. I think they are simply confused. They have not picked up from their surrounding culture what it means.

It is even worse than a word from some foreign language. If I tell someone to "stop pidge-mongling !", they at least know that they don't know what I'm talking about, and realize they need to learn what that means if they want to know what I said. They probably won't, of course, but they at least know that they would need to.

If I tell a non-Christian American to "stop sinning!", they 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 they know what I'm saying, but are almost certainly wrong. It's the worst-case failure for communication.

So I try to largely avoid those words. I try to use them very carefully and in a way that they can be understood within the context of the given post, without assuming people just know what the word means. For those who are non-Christian but interested, it should help them understand. For those who are knowledgeable about Christian terminology, the translation should not be difficult.

But the problem is also an opportunity. I will post about what some of these words are, translate them into modern terminology, and take the opportunity to explain where they fit into the Christian explanation of the world and the solution it presents.

I will start with something I typed in the previous sentence and then had to erase: the Good News, or in the Greek-descended English word, the Gospel. I wanted to type "Good News" rather than "solution". This is the news that you are not stuck with the problems of the world, or the errors you make in your life, or the eternal consequences of those errors.

Jesus offers you what you could never get on your efforts: He will pay for those errors, He will welcome you into his family, and the eternal negative consequences of your errors will be removed. You will be made into someone who can live forever, perfected, with God and all the other perfect beings.

But this "good news", and the term "good news", only appeals to people who know the "bad news" in the first place. I know many people would think that Jesus' "good news" would be something like "I guess people can be nice if they try.", which is not only not what the Good News is, it is outright contradicted by the Bible.

As it is written, "There is no one righteous; no, not one. There is no one who understands. There is no one who seeks after God. They have all turned aside. They have together become unprofitable. There is no one who does good, no, not, so much as one." - Romans 3:10-12

There is a whole set of meanings and relationships to other terms that the term "Good News" has to go with before it means anything.

Before that term, or any of the other Christian terms, can be used to communicate with a modern person, it must first be explained from the very beginning.

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in him whom they have not heard? How will they hear without a preacher? - Romans 10:14

#xstemsyChoice

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/09/christian_terminology/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

Last time, I talked about one aspect of the problem that faces us.

It is really only one aspect of a large problem, but in some sense it is the part that most concerns me. God can not bless us with what he wants to bless us with, eternal life and joy, because we are broken. Giving it to us now in our current state would only ruin it for everyone, and also ruin us individually because we can't handle it. It would also ruin us as people, to be able to cause hurt but still have the rewards for the virtuous.

Moreover, we have already hurt each other and ourselves, and if we are to live in a universe that can have real positive consequences, it must also have real negative for hurts caused. Justice must be done.

I personally would not have an objection if God just agreed to wave it away. Agreed that it was all in the past, and from this point on He will make it all right and change us so we no longer hurt each other or ourselves.

There are also people who on a deep, intuitive level realize that even their mistakes need to have an effect on the world, that if their mistakes were just waved away, it would be deeply, profoundly wrong.

Those people are right, and my feelings are wrong. There must be Justice. The harm we caused must be paid for.

The problem is, we can't pay it. We have no capital to pay it with. We have caused lasting harm to ourselves and others, and we have no resources to recompense the victims. If we try to pay our own debt, we will never be able to. It is not possible. No matter how long we stay in hell, we will never have paid our price.

That is how big our problem is.

God's solution to that problem is on the one hand, complex and nuanced enough to study for a lifetime, but on the other hand, you can boil it down simply as:

He offers to pay it for us.

And once paid, to fix us, not just to correct the consequences of how we hurt each other, but to completely fix us, eventually putting us in new bodies that will not hurt or be hurt by others.

God came to Earth in Jesus, suffered and died in payment of the price we deserved to pay, and is willing to extend that payment to us.

There is only one catch, which is simply that you must take the offered payment in place of yours. He will not force it on us. Forcing it would render it meaningless. You must come to him of your own choice.

In the end, that's all Christianity is. The rest is just follow on; having taken the gift, we should follow Him as he requests and allow the Holy Spirit to start the process of fixing us now, even though it will not be finished in this lifetime. The down payments on the future rewards even in this life are worth pursuing. But the essence is:

• You are in error. You hurt yourself and others.
• You can't stop, and you can't undo the past harms.
• This has incurred a debt you can not repay.
• You accept Jesus' payment of that debt for yourself.
• In gratitude, you follow him in this life.
For as long as you draw breath, you can accept this offer.

#xstemsyCall

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/09/god_s_solution/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

One of most intriguing things about the Bible is its holographic nature. Writing such a complicated document would be a challenge for an individual author in one time period, but the way it holds together over centuries is astonishing.

Unfortunately, while I find this metaphor very interesting, the term "hologram" has taken on a lot of psuedoscientific overtones that I must first take a moment to clear away. The holographs that you see in day-to-day life, such as on your credit card, are the end result of many refinement steps.

That's much like the screen you are reading this on. It may seem almost magical in its capabilities if you look only at the modern end product, but if you study the history of its development, each step makes sense. It is only the final destination that seems like magic.

Much nonsense has been attached to the term "hologram" but all my point needs is a very primitive form of "hologram" that anyone can understand. In fact, anyone can 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 this sort of hologram. All you need is a bit of math, a pane of glass (preferably dark), and a compass. That is, the tool that you use to draw perfect circles that you probably haven't used since school. You may not have even used them then.

Have a look at Stephen Mould's video where he creates a holographic image by hand (https://t.co/YQs0n2GKqW). I don't know how much more demystified a concept can get than to show you how to make it yourself.

This is, of course, much more primitive than the ones you're used to. If you feel inclined to learn more about those I recommend this 3b1b video about "real" holograms (https://t.co/7FcvcFvVOu) as a followup. But the simple, primitive version will do for my point.

We are all used to art that works by being discrete points of color that live in a specific place. Again, that's exactly how the screen you are reading this on works.

Holograms do not work like that. What we would consider a "point" in the image is in fact smeared out; in the simple version of the hologram, into a circle, and in the more complicated version, across the entire hologram's surface.

The Bible is constructed like a hologram.

When a hologram is cut, it is not like cutting a conventional image. Instead of having somethings perfectly clear, and some things completely missing, it is more like you get a blurrier version of the original image. Part of the hologram is gone but the full image is still there in the imprint. To get the full sharpness of the image you need the whole thing, but the parts of it are still recognizable.

All of the major doctrines in Christianity are smeared throughout the entire Bible. A passage here, a verse there, a literary allusion over there. While the Bible does have "commandments", what most of the Bible consists of is not simple clear statements, but a complicated meshing of many strands of thought that one must pick through, gather up, and assemble to get clear doctrines from the strands.

A handful of individual humans have written something like this. It's not terribly common. But I'm sure I can't name an instance across multiple authors, across multiple centuries, with such high fidelity.

It staggers the imagination to think such a thing is even possible.

#xstemsySearch

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/08/the_holography_of_the_bible/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

Grand Theft Auto 6's price. Sony dropping their physical disks despite customer outcry. Subscriptions everywhere you turn. The entire concept of "enshittification". Anti-consumer practices everywhere.

I have been discussing this with people online in various places lately. I propose a simple solution: If you don't like the terms of the deal, don't take the deal.

If you don't like your subscription service going up in price, cancel it.

If you don't like that a deal has been spontaneously renegotiated by some large company in their favor, stop paying them.

What shocks me most in these debates aren't the people who dislike the change but are still willing to pay. That can be perfectly valid. A price that rises but you choose deliberately to pay is unfortunate, but sometimes it happens.

What shocks me are the people who literally can not conceive of not buying the product and taking the deal, no matter how bad the deal is.

I can't even parody it here for demonstration purposes. I've gone several levels down in various threads just trying to convey the idea of not taking the deal. Eventually I just keep going out of morbid curiosity about how long someone can fail to grasp the concept of not buying some particular thing.

Addiction is conventionally thought of in terms of drugs, gambling, or sex, but the modern world has developed several more types that we're still grappling with. Idolatry outside of Christian contexts is generally thought of exclusively in terms of worshiping an idol, specifically of some sort of god, other than the true God.

Both things have in common that whatever you can't say no to, owns you. Both of these things are bad because neither of these things are supposed to own you, and bad things are going to come from them owning you.

Both things also share in common that the earlier you fix them, the easier it is to deal with. Evil loves to create situations where the slope goes gently and comfortably down, but the walls rise around you slowly but surely. The earlier you get out of the trap, the easier it is, but the best time to get out of a trap you are already in is now, because it only gets harder as you go.

If you are one of those people who can't so much as cancel a streaming video service, or fail to purchase Grand Theft Auto 6, or anything else like that, you have given up your freedom and surrendered control, to people who are going to abuse that as much as they can get away with.

#xstemsyProblem

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/08/what_you_can_t_say_no_to_owns_you/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

How good do you have to be to live forever?

How good would the people around you have to be?

Assume for this post that you are going to live forever. Not specifically the "Christian" idea of living forever, just, you're not going to die. You'll stay your optimum age, say, 25 years old. You won't get sick. No worries about the universe dying in some manner, it'll go on forever too.

Now let's say you get into an argument with someone. Shouting advances to shoving, and then into violence. Your opponent can't kill you, but they can and do cut your arm off. It will never regrow any more than it would in real life.

How much damage has this person done to you? Every day you have to live without the benefit of your second arm. Sure, you eventually get used to it and can adapt. Perhaps someone is reading this who has one or zero arms and knows that personally.

Nevertheless, they have taken from you. How much have they taken?

They have taken from you infinitely. There are an infinity of days that you are living without the benefits of an arm you should have.

This is a silly story. But part of that silliness is the idea that such a wound would be your only one. If it is possible to lose an arm like that, and if you lived with people who were even slightly willing to perform such an act, then on the infinite time scale it would be no time at all before hardly anybody had any limbs left.

Even worse would be the eternity in which you could accumulate emotional wounds. You hurt yourself by making bad decisions. You hurt others. Others hurt you. I hurt myself. I hurt others. The emotional scarring on someone who has lived 10,000 years would scarcely be conceivable to anyone alive today, and I say that aware of the horrors that some people have lived through in the real world. Even if a given emotional wound heals, the wounds would affect your decisions going forward, such as making it hard to love people safely, itself leading to further wounds and harm. If real consequences are possible, then beings who will create these sorts of real consequences for themselves and for others are fatally poisonous to any sort of eternal life.

No one who hurts others like this, and perhaps even moreso, no one who hurts themselves like this, can be allowed into any sort of "heaven". They would destroy it.

𝘞𝘦 would destroy it. That's us, today, right now. We can't get into any sort of heaven as we are now. Even if we were allowed into it, we would destroy it, for others, and for ourselves. The world that today's humans would create is visible around you now, and it is certainly not "heaven".

That is a view on the fundamental problem Christianity seeks to address.

Since this is a short post, this little story is built on a lot of assumptions. Such as whether it is even possible to live forever, in any manner. There will be followups on those other questions later. For this post I asked you to just assume it was possible, but we can't live our real lives on the basis of such hypothetical assumptions.

And this is a very human-centric and self-centered way of looking at it. Still, while I'd call it 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘦 , it isn't necessarily 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨 .

But this is my answer to the question I hear somewhat frequently, "Why can't God just let people into Heaven as they are?"

You are broken. I am broken.

You need to be fixed. I need to be fixed.

And we can't fix ourselves... but more about that later.

#xstemsyProblem

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/08/how_good_do_you_have_to_be_to_live_forever/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

We don't hardly have groups anymore. Our marketing machine prefers to turn individuals into brands rather than groups, like Taylor Swift.

It's weird because you'd think the long-standing rotating idol groups in Japan would be a preferable model for them. Less risk on one individual, less ability for one individual to threaten to walk away and ruin the investment, less risk from any one member not working out.

But that's how it is here now in the music scene. Individual artists and nameless people on the stage behind them.

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

Sometimes I debate with people about school reform. I will propose that some particular topic should be removed from the standard curriculum, and that we should add something else instead. Or perhaps that a certain set of facts should be removed, so that we can teach some other skill instead.

These debates never go well for me, because when discussing school most people have this very peculiar idea. Based on the arguments they make, they seem to believe that if you are a 10 year old child, and a teacher tells you some fact in a classroom, that you will remember it perfectly for the rest of your life. You will also fully understand all the implications of the fact. You will be 60 years old and still remember this thing you were told once, 50 years ago.

It makes debate difficult because every idea I propose we could remove to make room for something else is treated as denying the only opportunity in life for the children to learn this particular thing. The other people become so appalled at the idea that I might be willing to steal the precious information about the major exports of countries on other continents from our students that they can't think about anything else.

The children who are actually in schools are well aware this is complete nonsense. I remember after tests my fellow students asking the teacher if the particular topic we were quizzed on was going to be on future tests. They ask this, because of course they are well aware that not only are they not going to retain this information for the next 50 years, they aren't planning on retaining it for the next 50 hours.

Somehow those children lose that understanding on the way to adulthood.

We generally can't learn anything from just one exposure. We must be exposed repeatedly to retain it. We must practice skills on an ongoing basis to retain them.

This includes the information of Christianity and the skill of being a Christian. In this manner it is no different than any other set of facts or skill.

Sometimes I hear mature Christians who attend a sermon about some basic matter of Christianity complain that they didn't "get anything" out of the sermon, because it is things they have heard before.

Now, there is the obvious point that it is quite self-centered to assume that all sermons must always be targeted directly at you, without regard to what other people may need. But put that aside for now.

Even when my pastor preaches something I think I know very well, I listen attentively. Even if the sermon doesn't have a single new thing, I listen.

Because it is like exercise... you never outgrow the basics. No athlete ever advances far enough into professional sports to outgrow pushups or stretching.

There is an entire world out there trying to crush every bit of Christianity out of us. Only a fool believes themselves so immune to it that they can afford to ignore the basics.

Even someone decades into their study of Christianity has not outgrown the need to listen to the most basic presentation on the fundamentals of Christianity.

#xstemsyMaturity

permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/08/the_importance_of_repetition/

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

@tanpukunokami Friendly, unless they're trying to sell you something. That's much less common though.

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

@ITkuma3 We often get prayer requests that are just, "God knows what I need". And nobody asks anything more.

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

Schools taught us a very rigid essay format: 5 paragraphs, middle 3 paragraphs with one topic sentence and four supporting sentences, and the first and last paragraph basically a restatement of the topic sentences.

BOOOOORRRRRRIIIIIIINNNNNGGGGGGG.

Even when I was a kid in school I could tell that 1. no essays were ever actually written that way and 2. if we all really did write essays that way we'd go crazy with the repetition of it all.

Now, decades later, I can see my younger self was correct. AI doesn't write quite as rigidly as the school 5 paragraph essay form, but without further prompting it will rigorously write very "well-structured" essays, with defined chunks and headers and generally one of a handful of top-level structures around "What the problem is" and "Here's why that matters".

And it's driving us all bonkers. I'm deluged with well-formed essays now, all written to what a teacher would have considered very well-structured twenty years ago, and it's nails-on-a-chalkboard now. It doesn't help that a lot of these well-formed essays have nothing to say, but even the ones that do are still getting hard to read just because of the stereotypicalness of the essay form.

While essays do need some structure and to generally have a through-line, young me was completely correct that if everybody writes the same super-structured essays all the time, with the same structures, we wouldn't actually consider it good writing. Young me wouldn't have anticipated not only having his theory tested, but having those tests thrust upon the entire reading world, though.

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

@hoshizorarock Mocking people based on their names was big when I was in early school. Lots of rhyming insults.

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

Oh, you should see the "cube rule": https://t.co/GqfaocpqVX

For cross-cultural reference, the page itself is a joke. People don't agree on the rules and the joke of the page is precisely the silly categorizations that result if you take it seriously, as shown in the pictures. Or at least what seems silly to our culture.

The general confusion the joke is about is real, though.

[xstemsy @xstemsy]

Why does the Bible say that we can become "children of God"?

There's a number of angles one can take on that question and perhaps I'll revisit those later. Today I want to discuss why it is "children" of God, and not some other word that implies adulthood.

In this world, childhood is a temporary state. Parents are often reminded "the days are long but the years are short", that your children will not be children forever.

The Bible never suggests that for those who choose to become Children of God that the status as "children" ever ends. We seem to be children forever.

Why is that?

We have a hard time visualizing Heaven from our current perspective. Many of us worry that it could become boring because we might run out of things to do or something if we live forever. I think that is not the case, because we will be growing forever. We will not run out of "things to do" because we will ourselves be growing. We will become capable of doing even more things as we grow, and those new things will always out pace our growth.

(I put quotes around "things to do" because that isn't the right way to think about it, but that's also a topic for another day.)

So if we grow forever, when do we catch up to God?

Never. We never catch up to God. He is infinite. Finite beings can never catch up to infinity by the accumulation of finite growth in finite time.

That means that in relation to God, we will forever be His children.

In the current world we associate childhood with necessary restrictions, limitations of responsibility, and certain barriers that we can not overcome until we are "adults" by the standards of our culture. There is particularly in our modern world an uncomfortable stretch of years where our bodies say that we are ready to be adults but our cultures and the requirements of the modern world say we are not ready to be full "adults".

Once we transition to "adult", there is no further growth we culturally recognize. There are very few rights that a culture only accords to people once they are 40 years old. It's pretty much just the one transition to "adulthood" and that's it.

These sorts of concepts will not apply to this sort of childhood. The time will come when the followers of Christ are far more "adult" than any current adult. All the positive qualities of adulthood - responsibility, control, ability, authority - all will be had in inconceivably greater quantities compared to anyone alive today. The negative aspects that we associate with the word "child" will not apply.

But we will forever be "children" of God, because compared to Him, we will still be just beginning to grow.

#xstemsyEncouragement permalink: https:/xstemsy.com/post/2026/08/why_are_we_children_of_god/

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