In John 7, the religious leaders are furious with Jesus. Not because he did something cruel or immoral—but because he healed someone on the Sabbath. And rather than apologize or back down, Jesus does something that will feel very familiar to anyone who's ever started pulling at the threads of their inherited theology—He deconstructs the argument in real time.

"Because Moses gave you the commandment about circumcision," Jesus says—and then immediately corrects himself—"although it wasn't Moses but the patriarchs." You catch that? Before he even finishes his point, he's already questioning the attribution. The law they're citing as Mosaic? It predates Moses. The tradition they've built their case on has a more complicated origin story than they're letting on.

Then he goes further. "You circumcise a man on the Sabbath," he says. "If a man can be circumcised on the Sabbath without breaking Moses' Law, why are you angry with me because I made an entire man well on the Sabbath?"

This is spirit-of-the-law versus letter-of-the-law thinking, and it's liberating. Jesus isn't saying the Torah is bad or irrelevant. He's saying the religious leaders have confused the rules with the purpose behind the rules. Circumcision on the Sabbath was permitted because bringing someone into the covenant community was more important than technical rest. Healing—restoring someone to wholeness, to full participation in communal life—is the same kind of act. If anything, it's more so.

Jesus finishes with a line that could be the motto for every honest faith journey: "Don't judge according to appearances. Judge with right judgment."

If you're in the middle of rethinking what you were taught about the Bible, about sin, about who's in and who's out—this passage matters. Because Jesus Himself modeled exactly what faith deconstruction can look like when it's done with integrity. He didn't dismiss Scripture. He took it more seriously than the people who were using it as a weapon. He asked what the text was actually trying to accomplish rather than treating it as a checklist of rules to enforce.

There's an important distinction here. The religious leaders were reading Torah as a closed system: a set of boundaries to police. Jesus was reading Torah as wisdom: a set of principles meant to guide people toward flourishing. The leaders wanted to know, "Did you break the rule?" Jesus wanted to know, "Did you participate in what the rule was designed to protect?" Those are very different questions. And I believe the second one is closer to the heart of God.

This is what makes deconstruction a deeply faithful act rather than a rebellion against faith. When you start asking, "What is this passage actually trying to do?" instead of "What does this passage literally say?"—you're not abandoning Scripture. You're reading it the way Jesus did.

The religious leaders in John 7 remind me of some folks I've encountered along the way. People who are so committed to the letter of their theology that they've lost the ability to see that their interpretation is producing harm rather than healing. People who would rather be technically right than actually good.

Jesus wasn't interested in being technically right. He was interested in making people whole. And he was willing to dismantle bad interpretations of Scripture to get there—even the ones that had been around for centuries, even the ones everyone assumed were settled.

If you're asking hard questions about what you were taught, you're in good company. The rabbi from Nazareth got there first.

Wild bible fact

Ancient rabbis taught that the first human in Genesis 1 was originally androgynous—both male and female in one body—and wasn't divided into two sexes until Genesis 2. Source

What if America were average?

America's crises aren't unsolvable mysteries but solved problems in peer democracies. This article explains what America could look like if we were average, instead of so far below average.

The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls
On the optimism of preparation in a time of democratic decay.
On Data and DemocracyAdam Bonica

Some data on what American COULD be like—if our leaders gave a shit. "Universal healthcare is not some utopian fantasy. It is Tuesday in Toronto. Affordable higher education is not an impossible dream. It is Wednesday in Berlin. Sensible gun regulation is not a violation of natural law. It is Thursday in London. Paid parental leave is not radical. It is Friday in Tallinn, and Monday in Tokyo, and every day in between."

Backing up 86 million files

Love this project of backing up the entirety of Spotify and some of the wild statistics.

  • 86 million files representing 99.6% of listens
  • The top three songs on Spotify have more total streams than the bottom 20-100 million songs combined. Die With A Smile, BIRDS OF A FEATHER, and DtMF (combined ~7.3 billion streams) outweigh tens of millions of obscure tracks.
  • 70% of Spotify's 256 million tracks have been streamed fewer than 1,000 times.

Maps are a testament to the power of human cooperation

Waste some time playing Windows 3.1 games