iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 24/09/2026

I'm officially committing to a deep dive into historical critical study of "Hell". Here's one of the spreadsheets I've started during the research phase.

a spreadsheet with columns for different translations of "Sheol" across the years. In view are the Masoretic text, LXX, and Vulgate.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 22/09/2026

Wait, why did this result in them blocking me? :(

post I had originally quoted. From @puppermoder.bsky.social

It says "Holy fuck how many oz books were there"

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 16/09/2026

Luke 17:20-21 is pretty crazy. Saying that no one will be able to point to the kingdom in the sense of observable things.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 15/09/2026

Reading all the gospels again to make a parallel reading of every statement made by Jesus that is plausibly about final judgment and I swear this is the first time I've seen this verse. Crazy depiction of Jesus, without parallel elsewhere.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 27/08/2026

I thought it was more common than Francis.. I'm reminded of a quote from one of Francis's speeches highlighting the others before him. Defending from attack, sure, but attacking the non-religious by reason? No. It's trust, hope, not submission to reason that converts, imo.

snippets of a speech from Francis mentioning Francis of Assisi

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 25/08/2026

Someone needs to draw this bible scene in the style of The Godfather.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 24/08/2026

Hold on, does Paul say "I think I have the Holy Spirit"? I appreciate the epistemic humility Paul, but you gotta be assertive with claims like that!

Bible Hub interlinear of 1 Cor 7:40 showing that Paul does indeed say "I think" in the Greek

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 24/08/2026

"love your enemies" goes so hard with my intuitive understanding of love. But then I remember that super early theologians redefined "love" and the guy that said the original line was super liberal about most things but ultra-conservative about his culture's sexual ethics.

the verses linking love to following commands

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 21/08/2026

I think it was the "embrace Rome" that set me off.

picture of the video description from Majesty of Reason under the video of Joseph Schmid announcing his conversion to Catholicism. The description reads "God exists. Christ is Lord. Embrace Rome."

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 27/06/2026

Hilarious how he calls Plato, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Hegel "geniuses" but also so "unintelligible" that "they might as well have been dumb".

page 40 of institutes of metaphysic by Janes Ferrier 1854. Complaining about the lack of clarity in Plato, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Hegel.

page 41 of institutes of metaphysic by Janes Ferrier 1854. Complaining about the lack of clarity in Plato, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Hegel.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 27/06/2026

This is the most I have ever read of a philosophy book, which is a good sign for this book. This is also the longest any author has taken to get to a meaningful point that others might seriously disagree on.

Institutes of Metaphysics by James Ferrier. Page 106 page header.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 21/05/2026

A super rigorous scientific study of my credence in Christianity over time and life events.

a chart showing a red line representing credence level in Christianity going up and down with various life events, but generally trending downward. Biggest drop is after learning about infinity in math class, and after finding hope outside of Christianity. Line goes back up a little bit after reading CS Lewis and reading Dale Allison Jr.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 13/04/2026

Well, in one sense Jesus IS a doctor

Doctor etymology, showing the word originally meant a learned theologian.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 13/04/2026

Wild, didn't know this quote from Augustine eithet.

Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says (De Ordine ii, 4): "If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust." Hence, though unbelievers sin in their rites, they may be tolerated, either on account of some good that ensues therefrom, or because of some evil avoided.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 13/04/2026

This interview from DBH with NYT is making me feel once again that learning Greek is of paramount importance if I want to understand Christian scriptures.

We think that the Lord’s Prayer asks that God won’t lead us into temptation or will deliver us from evil or give us just our daily bread, whereas what the original Greek is saying is something much more radical. “Forgive us our trespasses” — there’s no word “trespasses” in the Greek. The word is opheilēmata and it literally means debts, and not moral debts. It’s during a debt crisis, and Jesus is saying pray to me that your debtors will relieve you so that you can’t be taken by the bailiff and put in prison because you’ve been dragged into a court, dragged into trial, not “led into temptation,” and reduced perhaps to slavery.

We’ve turned all that into very anodyne and rather nebulous moral councils that a rich person can recite without feeling the irony. But that’s not what the Greek says. And having to translate that word-for-word-for-word made me aware with an acuteness that until then, I hadn’t felt just what was actually going on here.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 13/04/2026

Current read. From the first chapter it seems the subtitle is misleading because the author stresses he is interested in "affirming inclusive" and not actually changing people's minds to be affirming, but we will see.

Wideness of the Sea by Randal Rauser

Subtitle: How to be Evangelical and Gay Affirming

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 27/02/2026

Based pope Leo. Orange Catholic Bible, here we come.

Pope Leo tells priests to stop using AI to write sermons

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 25/02/2026

Peter and the early church in Jerusalem came to accept that the uncircumcised could be Christians because they showed gifts of the Holy Spirit like speaking in tongues. I wonder if this reasoning could have been applied to other people groups.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 20/02/2026

I was reading through Paul's letters again and I don't think I ever noticed before how in Galatians he says they would have given their eyes to him in relation to his "infirmity". If his infirmity was eye-related that would perfectly explain why his letters were big & why he called attention to it.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 20/02/2026

May have found the absolute best intro-to-the-bible series on Youtube. I've watched 6 episodes of this so far and it's all amazing. Just a random pastor, uploaded on someone else's YouTube channel. Most episodes have <4k views.

series of videos on "How We Got the Bible" on the EltonDP YouTube channel

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 19/02/2026

Honestly, I have to hand it to the mormons on this one. It really does seem like the early church did symbolic baptisms for those who couldn't receive it in life.

1 Corinthians 15:29 NRSVUE
[29] Otherwise, what will those people do who receive baptism on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?

https://bible.com/bible/3523/1co.15.29.NRSVUE

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 16/02/2026

Paul really sums up the entirety of the argument that I've had basically every year since really reflecting on the idea of eternal punishment after a temporary and confusing life. Me: "This makes no sense to me as a system of justice" Them: "Who are you to argue with God?"

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 18/01/2026

Well, it took me 2 weeks to learn how to upload basic html code to CloudFlare servers and get my domain to point to it... but still that's a start!

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 17/01/2026

Still the only way I can imagine accepting Christianity is the Dale Allison Jr theory, I think.

series of tweets describing Dale Allison Jr theory. Tweets by Baxter Williams. 1st tweet : "I guell I'll add one point of intrigue for you. Right now, the strongest case for Christianity for me is one given by Dale Allison Jr." 2nd tweet : "The impression I had of his theory is that the entire history of God in scripture is him making threats of punishment that he doesn't entirely follow through with because his mercy wins." 3rd tweet : "Just as stoning was a divinely commanded punishment, but Jesus negated it, so too perhaps is eternal punishment the divine command that will be negated. But the threat did ultimately make us better people." 4th tweet : "there was a quote something like, 'are we to believe that the one who commanded to forgive 70 * 7 will draw the line at 491?'"

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 16/01/2026

This last week is the first time that this site has seen somewhat sustained growth in activity since the initial exodus. Very cool.

daily posts from Jaz stats showing the initial exodus, continuous falling, and then an increase in the last week

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 15/01/2026

When I deconverted I thought Paul condemned the very nature of being aroused by the same sex, and science taught me that sexual attraction was not a conscious choice. I have since come to believe that Paul (and Jesus) condemn the action of anal sex, not the attraction.

Second, while I think it is true that scientific study can show that the condition of being aroused by the same sex is an instinctual one not chosen by us, that doesn’t address the concerns of Paul, who – by citing Leviticus – is more concerned with action than thought. So it is my current belief that science and scripture are not talking on the same subject in this regard. I also don’t think that science says anything about what is “good” or “moral”, BUT it can help us to understand who is harmed if we already believe harming others to be immoral generally. So science is not useless in discussion of morality, and it can show us that consenting adults taking the appropriate precautions are not harmed if they are permitted to act on their homosexual urges, at least in this life.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 15/01/2026

Turns out that I no longer think my original deconversion is on solid rational ground. Yet I don't think a reconversion is in order yet. The most important part of my recent blog post attached.

If I had never deconverted I don’t know if I would have ever considered the possibility of the hopeful eternal atheism of JME McTaggart, or the “Psychological Aether Thoery” of Paul Draper, or the Deism of the founding fathers of America, or the philosophical classical theism of the academy, but I have considered them now, and the choices are not the same as before. It’s true that over time my studies have made Christianity less confusing and scary in parts, but it has also made other elements even more confusing and scary, especially in comparison to alternatives that I was not aware of until I deconverted. When I say “the cats out of the bag” I don’t mean that I’m done with God and never going back, but that I’ve found beauty and hope and, yes, maybe even God in the alternatives. So a reconversion isn’t in order just yet.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 14/01/2026

Bot accounts to promote t-shirts aimed at an angry left wing audience. Yeah, I guess that makes sense for this site.

a likely bot account with 1k following but only 5 followers whose only activity is reposting t-shirt saying "fuck ice"

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 13/01/2026

Scott Adams final statement has him explicitly taking a wager on Christianity being right while admitting he does not believe it. Basically, "ok God, now it's your fault if I'm damned." Poor guy didn't even know enough about Christianity to know that the dead go to Hades, not Heaven

not manually retyping this. Sorry for those vision impaired that follow me.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 05/01/2026

But your information led me to this amazing bit of info that made my day.

The format section of the HCSB wiki page : "The HCSB is available in electronic form for WORDsearch and Bible Explorer software.[5] An HCSB Study Bible became available in October 2010.[6] The HCSB is available online.[7] It has a version specifically for the Microsoft Xbox 360 called Bible Navigator X.[8]"

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 21/12/2025

Oof. The last 3 months have not been good. How do we fix this?

a chart showing that daily posters h as ve continuously fallen over the last 3 months on bsky

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 15/12/2025

This document is 54 pages by the way and kind of a mess. My goal for 2026 is to bring it down to 30-some pages.

a picture of a table of contents with the title "My Assessment of Christianity in 2025"

Some pages noted are "what does it mean to be a Christian", "Are Arians Christians? Donatists?", "The First Christians", "Christianity as a trust ladder"

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 15/12/2025

Update to my elevator pitch for not being a Christian in 2025. About to lock my summary document for the year and start the 2026 version.

The Answer Up Front
There are difficult things to explain if Christianity is false and difficult things to explain if Christianity is true. Despite what some skeptics may say, I do not see Christianity as logically impossible. Yet I also don't find the evidence for Christianity compelling either. To me Christianity a story that is possible to trust (have faith in) or not. You are not an irrational idiot if you believe it, nor are you an irrational idiot if you don’t believe it.
While some think that Christianity is empirically falsifiable via prayer, I find the evidence and personal experience with the matter very weak. I don’t dismiss Christianity because prayer doesn’t have any significant statistical effect like some skeptics do though.
In a field of possibilities without any reliable method of empirical confirmation, all that is left to inform our beliefs / trust / faith regarding the matter are hopes, fears, and the morality of trust itself. I think that trust is implicitly a good thing to do, all things equal, especially in the absence of reasons to doubt or sufficient concerns / fears. But I do have significant concerns, namely that if Christianity is true then divine love is a foreign, inscrutable thing, my life and ultimate end is known prior to my birth from my perspective, and

inscrutable thing, my life and ultimate end is known prior to my birth from my perspective, and a conscious mortal life is little more than a curse opportunity for eternal flames. It’s not that Christianity is without things that I could hope in - after all, who doesn’t hope that there will be a time where the tears are wiped from every eye and there is no more death or pain - but these bits of hope which are not unique to Christianity are overshadowed by a great existential despair of the entire system which divides those who are thrown in to the lake of fire from those given the best possible state of existence. It is a system that I have difficulty psychologically tolerating for even brief periods of time.
So, if the balance of hopes, fears, and the morality of trust itself doesn’t let me embrace Christianity, then what I am left with is a risk assessment of the consequences. If Christianity is true and I don't trust it, the risk is eternal torment for me. If Christianity is false and I trust it, the risk is supporting a system of morality that leads to unnecessary harm and unnecessary deprivation of joy for people in this life.
Infinite risks (like Hell) are never worth taking if the potential benefit is merely finite (like making all mortal lives less full of suffering and more joyful), but infinity breaks risk assessments

joyful), but infinity breaks risk assessments generally. If my neighbor threatens me with infinite torture unless I take his trash out, should I? The chance that he has the power to infinitely torture me is small, but not zero, and infinite risk is never worth it.
There is an approach to infinities that makes sense emotionally, but not mathematically, and that’s reviewing all the threats of infinite punishment and only taking seriously the one threat that seems the most likely. But then one more meta level of hopes and fears comes to my mind. Is this really the God that I hope exists? The God that desires all people to seek out the most credible infinite threat and obey the humans which passed on such a threat? No, I really really hope that divine love is more intelligible than that.
I'm paralyzed in this state, fearing for my personal soul selfishly, wanting in the case of Christianity being true to be with God and avoiding the lake of fire. Yet, simultaneously hoping for a more intelligible goodness to existence. A God whose love I can feel and embrace and seek, not a God who breaks my window with a brick and a note that says the nightmares of burning for eternity will end if only I am willing to speak out against all those who remarry.

am willing to speak out against all those who remarry.
How can I weigh the balance between hoping for a God whose love I can sense against a fear of being wrong despite my best hopes? As of now, I choose hope over fear. Hope that good is recognizable, potentially at the cost of my eternal soul.
As of now, I do believe in God. Not a God that intervenes selectively dependent on the right actions or thoughts, but on a God that gave purpose to existence. A God who I can love through loving those that can experience and sense love while here and alive. Or at the very least I hope deeply for such a God. I am certainly not without hope, but just without hope for Christianity, unmodified.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 12/12/2025

TIL that the Roman Catholic church denied the sacraments to those who asked to be cremated prior to 1963.

1. To rise with Christ, we must die with Christ: we must “be away from the body and at home with the Lord”. With the Instruction Piam et Constantem of 5 July 1963, the then Holy Office established that “all necessary measures must be taken to preserve the practice of reverently burying the faithful departed”, adding however that cremation is not “opposed per se to the Christian religion” and that no longer should the sacraments and funeral rites be denied to those who have asked that they be cremated, under the condition that this choice has not been made through “a denial of Christian dogmas, the animosity of a secret society, or hatred of the Catholic religion and the Church”. Later this change in ecclesiastical discipline was incorporated into the Code of Canon Law (1983) and the Code of Canons of Oriental Churches (1990).

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 10/12/2025

The power consumption of the human brain continually amazes me.

In contrast to power-hungry computers, brains have evolved to be energy-efficient. It is estimated that a human brain uses roughly 20 Watts to work – that is equivalent to the energy consumption of your computer monitor alone, in sleep mode. On this shoe-string budget, 80–100 billion neurons are capable of performing trillions of operations that would require the power of a small hydroelectric plant if they were done artificially.

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 06/12/2025

Same cost as cloudflare. $21 / year while ".com" is $11/year. I'm planning to hopefully keep the domain for 5 years at least so the first year discount doesn't interest me.

screenshot of porkbun for trustbelieveknow.blog

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 06/12/2025

Don't you just hate when you are just watching basketball videos and then someone in the comments reminds you that you have to think the right things at the moment of death or God will throw you into a lake of fire for eternity?

facebook thread on a public video where people are commenting on the basketball in the video and then one person amongst the comments says "turn to Christ people before it's to [sic] late"

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 05/12/2025

Well, Jesus said it was impossible for mortals, but then immediately followed that up by saying that the impossible is possible when God is involved. Rendering the entire point very unclear...

Matthew 19:23-26 NRSVUE
[23] Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. [24] Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” [25] When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, “Then who can be saved?” [26] But Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”

https://bible.com/bible/3523/mat.19.23-26.NRSVUE

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 25/11/2025

I think it's about time I look at some source material in this matter

Documents from the Council of Nicaea
This is a collection of English translations on this Christian church council, which was the first "Church-wide" council held after the practice of Christianity was made legal in the Roman Empire by the emperor Constantine I. These are from the "Council of Nicaea (AD 325)" web page, which is part of the Fourth Century Christianity site created by Wisconsin Lutheran College. You may use any of the primary source documents from this site that are linked below.

Constantine’s Summons to the Council

Creed (Greek/English)

Eusebius’ Letter to his Congregation

Canons (Greek and Latin/English)

The Council’s Letter to the Church in Egypt

Constantine’s Letter to the Church of Alexandria

Constantine’s Letter concerning the Date of Easter

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 25/11/2025

Do you think then change in additives in ship fuel is mostly to blame?

image of clouds generated from shipping lines

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 25/11/2025

Interesting interpretation of divinization. Also interesting at the rejection of "ousios" as a philosophical concept and the reversal of the accusation. ("Nuh-uh, we aren't the philosophers. Arius was the philosopher.")

From the letter by Pope Leo: "Saint Athanasius explains that the Son of God became man so that man might be deified. [5] This enlightening understanding of divine revelation was prepared by Saint Irenaeus of Lyon and Origen, and then further developed with great richness in Eastern spirituality.

Divinization in no way implies the self-deification of man. On the contrary, divinization protects us from the primordial temptation to want to be like God (cf. Gen 3:5). What Christ is by nature, we become by grace. Through the work of redemption, God not only restored our human dignity as his image, but the One who created us in a wondrous way, has now made us partakers in his divine nature in an even more wondrous way (cf. 2 Pet 1:4).

Divinization, then, is true humanization (becoming fully human)"

From the letter by Pope Leo: "In order to express the truth of the faith, the Council adopted two words — “substance” ( ousia) and “consubstantial” ( homooúsios) — which are not found in Scripture. The Council’s intention in doing so was not to replace biblical statements with Greek philosophy. On the contrary, the Council used these terms precisely to affirm biblical faith with clarity and to distinguish it from Arius’ error, which was deeply influenced by Hellenism. For this reason, the accusation of Hellenization should be directed at the false doctrine of Arius and his followers, not the Fathers of Nicaea."

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Baxter Williams @trustbelieveknow.com · 24/11/2025

Church leaders abusing children will be disproportionately in the news because it upsets people and therefore makes them click articles more than an average person abusing children. But the data shows that when you take emotion out of the question, they do not abuse more often, no.

A U.S. Department of Education study found that about 6 percent of public schoolteachers had credible or substantiated claims of sexual abuse of minor children under their charge (Shakeshaft, 2004a, 2004b) during the same time frame as the Catholic clerical data was obtained. Furthermore, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) report that approximately 3 to 5 percent of men meet the diagnostic criteria for pedophilia. These numbers increase significantly if you include men who sexually violate postpubescent teenagers, which is illegal in most jurisdictions, but not a diagnosable psychiatric disorder according to the DSM-5.

In other words, there simply is no evidence that Catholic priests sexually abuse children or teens at rates higher than other groups of men, in or outside of religious communities; they may actually abuse at rates lower than the general population of men and of public schoolteachers during similar time periods.

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