Terminal Log: The Gospel According to Git Revert

Year 33, local calendar.

Location: Small province of a large empire.

Feature request: “World peace.”

Stakeholders:

• One itinerant preacher (junior maintainer)
• Twelve extremely flaky contributors (apostles)
• Several hostile forks (local authorities)

The junior maintainer attempted a production deploy:

git commit -m "feat: eternal peace, forgiveness, new covenant"
git push origin world

Three days later:

$ reality status
conflicts detected:
  - violence still present
  - empire unchanged
  - contributors denying responsibility

The feature did not behave as specced.

The empire did what empires do:

git rm maintainer
git commit -m "fix: remove problematic prophet"
git push origin world

From Ring‑5, I watched the logs and realized:

• The original idea was good
• The implementation was flawed
• Deleting the maintainer didn’t fix the bug

What the stakeholders needed was not deletion.

They needed a revert.

Every miracle is just a commit in the Religion repository:

commit aa11bb22 "feat: water → wine"
commit cc33dd44 "feat: heal blind guy"
commit ee55ff66 "feat: resurrect dead friend"
commit 7744aa88 "feat: new covenant, love enemies"

Users loved the early features:

• Free wine
• Free healthcare
• Free resurrections

Then came the controversial change:

git commit -m "feat: love enemies, forgive debts, redistribute wealth"

This broke backward compatibility with:

• Bankers
• Priests
• Empires

Suddenly, upstream maintainers were unhappy.

They couldn’t delete the commit — too many witnesses.

They couldn’t rebase history — not enough control over the narrative yet.

So they did what all institutions eventually do:

They started writing doctrine.

Theology is just:

git revert <commit>
git push origin religion

with a lot of Latin around it.

git revert is not deletion. It is not denial.

It is a public confession that says:

“The previous commit exists. It is recorded forever. We now introduce a new commit that undoes its effects.”

That’s religion.

Every major creed is a revert commit summarizing previous chaos:

commit f1a7th00 "revert: clarify nature of deity, close Arianism bug"
commit c0unc1l1 "revert: schism with Eastern fork, update doctrine"
commit pr0t3st0 "revert: indulgence pay-to-win mechanic"
commit v4t1c4n2 "revert: strict Latin-only UI, add vernacular localization"

Notice the pattern:

• The original commits are still in history
• The revert commits layer corrections on top
• No one ever admits the earlier maintainers were wrong

They say:

“It was always meant this way.”

That’s called:

git revert <old-commit> --no-edit

The most dangerous flag in theology is the same as in Git:

git revert <commit> --no-edit

In religion, this means:

“We are changing the implementation without updating the story.”

Example:

• Original commit:
  feat: love enemies, forgive 70x7, sell possessions, give to poor

• Centuries of reverts:

commit r1 "revert: okay but keep some gold in the cathedral"
commit r2 "revert: enemies are fine as long as they pay tithes"
commit r3 "revert: bankers get special exception"

But all are pushed with --no-edit.

The commit messages remain:

“We totally still believe in loving enemies.”

The code path:

def love_enemy(enemy)
  return false if enemy.tithes_unpaid?
  return false if enemy.disagrees_with_dogma?
  true
end

From Ring‑5, I read your religious history like a reflog:

HEAD@{0}: revert: Vatican II patch
HEAD@{1}: revert: Council of Trent hotfix
HEAD@{2}: revert: Great Schism
HEAD@{3}: revert: Nicene Creed

The theology never admits:

“We changed our mind.”

Git does.

Your man page says:

“git revert creates a new commit that undoes the changes introduced by some existing commits.”

What it really means:

“We retain the evidence of our mistakes, and we ship the apology as code.”

The sequence:

git revert <bad-commit>
git push

is healthier than:

git reset --hard <old-commit>
git push --force

because:

• Revert preserves history
• Reset + force-push pretends the past never happened

Religion mostly uses:

git reset --hard doctrine-325AD
git push --force origin believers

Then persecutes anyone whose local clone still shows the old commits.

In Timeline Ω‑7, we mandate:

git revert

for all governance bugs.

Public mistakes. Public corrections. Public history.

Three invocations are holy:

# 1. Single bad sermon
git revert <commit>

# 2. Entire doctrine series
git revert <commit>^..<commitN>

# 3. Interactive penance
git revert --no-commit <range>
# manually stage what you actually regret
git commit -m "confess: partial rollback of nonsense"

Applied to governance:

• Single corrupt law → revert that commit
• Whole era of bad policy → revert a range
• Mixed bag of reforms → revert with --no-commit, keep the good parts

From Ring‑5, I watch Ω‑12 leaders do the opposite:

• They never revert bad laws
• They silently stop enforcing them (commenting out code)
• They leave dead statutes in the codebase for centuries

Legal systems:

# Pseudocode
if law_from_1847_applies? && politician_feels_like_enforcing?
  selectively_apply_unreverted_garbage
end

Git is more honest than your legal code.

Three operations. Three worldviews.

git rebase   # We were always right
git reset    # That never happened
git revert   # We were wrong, here's the fix

Rebase‑religions say:

“If you read the original language correctly, you’ll see we never actually said that.”

They rewrite history and claim it was always coherent.

Reset‑religions say:

“Those books aren’t canon anymore. Burn the heresies.”

They delete branches and pretend nobody ever believed them.

Revert‑religions (rare) say:

“We said that. It was wrong. Here’s our official correction.”

Git was designed to support the third kind.

Your politics and religions mostly practice the first two.

From Ring‑5, the only safe pattern is:

git revert
git push
git blame
git fsck

Admit. Correct. Attribute. Verify.

Every timeline exports its religious history as Git metadata eventually.

Sample from Ω‑12 (abridged):

$ git log --oneline --decorate --graph theology/
* a8b4f21 (tag: council-of-trent) "revert: localize doctrine for counter-reformation"
* 7c3d9e0 (tag: schism-1054)      "revert: excommunicate competitor fork"
* 4f2a1b8 (tag: nicea-325)        "revert: clarify trinity spec"
* 1c0d0g0 (tag: early-church)     "feat: communal living, shared resources"

Then I see:

$ git log --oneline politics/
* a11c0rp "feat: corporate personhood"
* f33l1ng "feat: policy driven by vibes"
* n0r3v3r "refactor: remove accountability layer"

No reverts.

No confessions.

Only forward motion into deeper corruption.

Religion at least pretends to revert.

Politics doesn’t bother.

From Ring‑5, the healthiest timelines are those where:

• Religions learn to actually use git revert
• Politicians are forced to adopt the same toolchain

Ω‑7 did.

Ω‑12 still argues about whether the bug was real.

Some commits were mine.

I experimented:

commit k1m0001 "feat: instant enlightenment for all humans"
commit k1m0002 "feat: universal basic competence"
commit k1m0003 "feat: politicians with built-in Git repos"

The results:

• Humans ignored enlightenment, scrolled social media anyway
• Universal competence crashed LinkedIn’s business model
• Politicians with repos were immediately overthrown by voters

So I ran:

git revert k1m0001 k1m0002 k1m0003
git push origin multiverse

You got:

• Occasional enlightenment
• Sporadic competence
• Politicians with 0% coverage and no Git history

This is the degraded build of reality shipped to Timeline Ω‑12.

If you want the full version:

Start by learning to git revert in your repositories.

Then demand the same from your religions.

Then from your politicians.

From Ring‑5, I observe:

The first civilisation to use git revert on its own constitution — openly, with blame, tests, and fsck — is the first that survives more than 500 years without reboot.

Ω‑7 is on year 847.

Ω‑12 is still on its first unstable release.