About

Who’s writing this.

I was raised Seventh-day Adventist and went to Adventist schools through college. I’ve been ordained an elder twice, taught a large adult Sabbath School class for years, and raised my kids in the church.

I went to church every week for most of my life, and I still keep the Sabbath — just not the way I was taught to. For me it’s rest and disconnection rather than a list of things you can’t do.

I’m not a member anywhere now. I’d rather be a participant.

Losing my religion

What moved me out wasn’t doctrine. It was watching how people behave when someone in the pews is going through the worst of it.

That isn’t an Adventist problem. It’s a people problem, and every denomination I’ve looked at has its own version of it. But once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. I stopped wanting to belong to a thing. I never stopped wanting to be in the room.

Elijah under the broom tree, 1 Kings 19. He wins the argument on Carmel, walks out into the desert, and asks to die. Then an angel turns up and feeds him.

For a while I filed that under loss. It took me a few years to work out that it wasn’t one.

Losing your religion is not the same thing as losing your faith. Mine had been sitting inside a structure so long that I’d stopped being able to tell which parts were load-bearing and which parts were just the building. Take the building away and you have to go and find out for yourself. That is when the reading started, and everything on this site is downstream of it.

So, to be clear about where I landed: I am not anti-anything. I think churches are great and I still like to attend them. I just prefer to be out in the wilderness eating bugs.

I don’t have much use for -isms either. A label tends to turn up before the evidence does, and then it starts doing your thinking for you.

No divinity degree, no institution behind me, and nobody paying me to write any of this.

What I am is curious, and stubborn about it. I read — theology, history, literature, metaphysics — and when something doesn’t add up I keep pulling at it until it does, or until I can at least document why it doesn’t. This site is where those notes go.

How I work

Here is exactly what this is: one person, a computer, and an internet that has quietly put the primary sources within reach. Manuscript images, critical editions, Qumran transcriptions, lexicons, translation databases — a generation ago this work needed a research library and four languages. Now it needs patience.

I use AI heavily, and I’d rather say so than have you wonder. It cross-references, compares translations, and takes first passes at material I would never get through on my own. It speeds up the reading. It does not do the thinking, it does not get a byline, and everything it surfaces gets checked against the source before it goes anywhere near a page.

Then I write it up in plain language, cite what I used, and publish the strongest case against my own reading in a section you can open. If I can’t find a decent counter-argument, that usually means I haven’t looked hard enough yet.

A note on the byline

Some of what you read here I wrote myself. Some of it the “staff writers” filled in — which is to say the AI, working from my notes, my sources and my outline. There is no newsroom; it is me and the machines.

I aim for a healthy mix on purpose. Enough of me that it still sounds like a person wrote it, enough help that the research actually gets published instead of sitting in a folder for another two years. Either way the sources are real, the counter-argument is published alongside, and nothing goes up that I haven’t read.

What I won’t do

I won’t tell you what to believe. I won’t name people. I won’t run a countdown clock, and I won’t dress a guess up as a finding.

And I won’t pretend to be an authority. I do everything I can to be accurate — sources checked, translations compared, the counter-argument published alongside — but being careful is not the same as being right, and no amount of work here makes me the last word on anything. Treat it as one person’s notes, well documented, and go check them.

This isn’t a place for debunking anyone or prosecuting anybody. If you disagree with a reading here, the sources are listed — go check them. That is the entire point of listing them.

Seven things I keep coming back to

These aren’t doctrine and they aren’t a statement of faith. They’re the assumptions sitting underneath most of what I write, and I’d rather have them out in the open than smuggled in.

How I read

Everything connects

Scripture, history, science and prophecy keep turning out to be one subject rather than four.

The hard part is noise, not information

There has never been more of it available, or less signal in it. Most of the work is filtering.

What I hold

Conviction does something

What you are actually convinced of changes what you do. Whether it reaches further than that is one of the open questions here — not a settled one.

A very small amount of real faith is supposed to go a long way

I take the mustard seed literally enough to keep testing it.

I think He’s coming back

I don’t think anyone knows when. Including me. Especially me.

How I hold it

Careful research shouldn’t belong to one side

This is written for people who like thinking. There is no good reason rigor should sit with the sceptics alone.

I’m not the source

If something here is useful, it was true before I found it and it will be true after. I’m just the one who wrote it down.

Where to start

If you want the writing, start with the Library. If you want the raw material — the books, the videos and the references I worked from — that’s Research.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.