Simon

Edgefield Church, Nashville: Start a Third-Party Investigation open.substack.com/pub/cheapgrace…

@ihtesham2005 What about having an AI write out your post for you? What does that do to your brain?

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

@jonathan_wilke exactly the same here. I typically find medium reasoning enough on 5.5 but occassionally need to toggle to high. Composer 2 can handle maybe 90% of what I do but I talk to it with more explicit instructions than I would 5.5.

Right now my daily driver AI model for coding is Composer 2. For extremely complex problems, I use GPT5.5. What's yours?

It’s worse than this. As well as typical church people being either unequipped, unwilling, fraudulent or deceived into not solving this problem, churches also have systems to remove from their congregation people who are motivated, able and willing to solve the problem. By falsely accusing them of having a bad tone or speaking out of place and worse.

Here’s my problem: The sort of people who are willing to sacrifice their time and sanity for the surveillance of pedophiles are not found ANYWHERE on this list—this very comprehensive list of church personalities.

I've seen it lol. "Godly" mean who give "grace" to an offender, direct quote from our situation, "he is a token of God's grace, the kind of miracle we long to see". We exposed SO as a liar having actually bothered to research, which the elders hadn't. Did they investigate further? Of course not... rNot a care for potential victims of the SO who attended "backyard bible camps" and had free reign around the youth groups.

@SimonCheapGrace I believe it.

Maybe the reason pastors don’t sermonize about this, and congregants don’t demand information and awareness on the issue—maybe it isn’t cognitive dissonance. Maybe they don’t want awareness to activate suspicions, or investigations into their households.

Okay, this might be it, but Veith illustrates that the very nature of a pedophile is dishonesty. They wear a mask every day. So it is fair to ask any pastor, how many sermons has their leadership team delivered on this issue, because this lack of education seems deliberate.

@RockWallBibles No public policy on safeguarding

POV: you’re browsing a church’s website. What is an immediate 🚩?

@AustinMnTX @megbasham I've never told the same lie twice (or more) over a number of years while pretending to be biblically above reproach in the office of a pastor. Poor attempt at a false equivalence.

@SimonCheapGrace @megbasham Have you ever told a lie in your life?

There have been doctrinal issues with this church and its pastor for some time now, treating the sin of same sex attraction as a special sort of sin, which need only be half crucified. It was not necessarily clear that this was how the bad doctrine would work itself out, but it was going to show bad fruit in some way eventually.

@heygurisingh They didn’t just show anything. This is 9 months old.

Anthropic just showed a 24-minute workshop on how to actually prompt Claude. Taught by the people who built it. Free. No signup. No paywall. I've watched $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

@SacrdCowTipping This is the same reason why they don't properly deal with sexual abuse in their churches. If someone's income (and ability to feed their kids) depends on the professional entity of the church, then they will never endanger it. Not to mention their pride.

I think 10% of pastors know they are unbiblical and would quit but they have no other skills or prospects. It definitely is a trap. Reinventing one self later in life is no small task.

The tendency towards false dichotomies is nowhere clearer than in modern man’s desire to play love against truth. But truth-telling is one of the greatest manifestations of love.

@MatthewPFirth the fact you think you can just put on some silly clothes and just assert things on X without backing them up with any logic or argument is exactly what's wrong with the people currently claiming to be leaders in the church.

@SimonCheapGrace You can actually.

The main damage to the Church’s gospel witness to the world during this matter has been done by those who profess to be Christians and yet flood social media with attacks on a repentant sinner.

@MatthewPFirth I mean, you can, but you'd be foolish to do so. With someone who on this very topic has an established history of saying what people want him to say without having to confront the truth. Foolish, and harmful.

@MatthewPFirth Repentance is something that will hopefully be demonstrated over a long time by him. It’s not something you can declare immediately in the wake of this. Especially after we’ve already had 2024 where this was brought up and put back to bed and not properly dealt with.

@MatthewPFirth Matthew, that’s a terrible argument. In fact, it’s not even an argument at all. He was a public figure. He has engaged in deceit and sexual sin. His only public action is to remove his social media. This isn’t repentance and it’s a cruelty to say otherwise.

Have christians collectively lost their minds? The idea that because someone chose 'professional christian' as a career track, that they paid for a seminary degree and learned to say the 'right things' with the 'right tone' and the 'right countenance' that they are in any way mature, wise, or worthy is INSANE! It is an unbiblical system that GUARANTEES an easy buffet dinner for wolves. It doesn't matter what seminary, what tradition, it is nonsense. The biblical solution - a plurality of elders, who are actually you know... old... it is in the title... who lived a real normal life with their community and only after that, where their character was tested and known in the real world over decades with their community, could they be recognized as elders for that community. The professionals who have a problem with this post out themselves - so take note.

@pete_tepper … but the message itself shows a total lack of cooperation from him throughout. Not disclosing the issue at time of hiring. Then not giving all relevant info in 2024 also. This goes beyond sexual sin too

Throughout this process, Sam has been repentant, humble, and cooperative with the Elders and outside counsel. The Elders continue to care for Sam as a brother in Christ and Member of Immanuel. We will continue to support Sam and the other party with counseling, and we are determined in so far as we are able to “restore him in a spirit of gentleness” to full fellowship in the church (Galatians 6:1). ...Meanwhile sinful X rushes to dunk on fellow sinner.

@coconservative7 I do not buy it. The events clearly speak to only revealing information as and when they are left with no choice but to do so Which leads me to ask, what else is hidden in the darkness there

Does anybody actually buy the claim that Immanuel Nashville leaders only "discovered" the true nature of Allberry's "relationship" in 2026? What they "discovered" was that their 2024 cover-up was about to be revealed.

@BMcGrewvy @RevJaredJones it says that "throughout this process" he's been co-operative. The process outlined above in the rest of the message is the full history of his hiring, 24 revelations etc.

@SimonCheapGrace @RevJaredJones No, it didn't use that word in that context, it said he's being cooperative now.

If Sam Alberry has repented, we know for sure that God loves Sam, he took off running to him before he even made it home, embraced him, robe, ring, fatted calf and all, and is rejoicing. Are you? God is more excited about Sam's repentance than your supposed righteousness.