4. Mirror of Confusion. Solomon's Red Telephone, 4. Wire: Turning away from the mark of the beast
Channel: Laurence Loewe of Laodicea
Date: 01/10/2022

This is the 4th wire of Solomon's Red Emergency Telephone (2.Chronicles 7:13-14): "turning back from evil ways" - if only it was always that easy to know what the most important evil is from which to turn back. Unfortunately, after millennia of eating from the Tree of Knowledge-faking by inappropriately using arbitrary choice-functions for separating good and evil it has become rather complicated to figure out what the most important evil is on God's list. At least for a WASP pharisee like me it's rather complicated if I insist on finding out what God really cares about (vs whatever I'd like to care about more than God does). It's so easy for me to find some lesser evil to "deal with" in order to "look busy". 
However God isn't fooled. What good is it from God's perspective if I busy myself with "properly emptying my tooth-paste" while I subscribe to the rounding-error of hopelessness that convinces me to ignore systemic evil that starves millions and exploits billions? At least that's how I understand Jesus' critique of hypocrisy in Matthew 23: focus on the most important things first, then take care of the lesser problems. It's the ultimate challenge for Laodiceans (who unfortunately love "bike-shedding"): work hard to keep the main thing the main thing. 
If I use this harsh-but-justified perspective to examine myself in the glaring light of (God's) day - and I don't apply theological filters that protect me from what I'd rather not hear, then I have to admit that I do carry some mark that looks to me unnervingly like the mark of the beast from Revelation 13 – even if every preacher I've ever heard on this and every book I've ever read on this claim something else. I've made it a point to test their arguments. Unfortunately, I can't get myself to believe them anymore - not if I apply the standards of rigor for analyzing biouncertainty which I've come to appreciate in the context of developing the Evolvix computer language compiler architecture that I've been working on professionally for over 10 years. I know that God still loves me. But I can't unsee that beastly mark - and I refuse to normalize it as I had been doing before "without thinking" (to quote Ps 73:22 for what beasts do). All of this means that I now face the long arduous, and narrow path of getting rid of that mark by replacing it with the Mark of God - using the strategy laid out by Jesus for that wild gang of conspirators in Laodicea. May God help us all. Because if I've understood that strategy correctly, I have no chance to ever do this "by myself for myself". Instead, I will have to learn to depend on a great many people to help me with that if I ever want to get rid of that mark this side of heaven.

I'm currently working to write up an overview of the most important points of whatever I've understood of that gentle kind reasonable – albeit no less challenging – survival strategy that Jesus has been calling for all this time. May God have mercy with my soul.

I'll be back with more once that overview description is done. 

The challenge feels a bit like the datageddon that John may have faced when writing Revelation: how to convey all those tons of insight in ca 10,000 words without making it wrong or misleading, so that someone has a chance to read and understand it. Except, that's not a fair comparison to the author of Revelation, because whoever wrote that genius masterpiece had such an incomparably harder task. By comparison all I'm doing is dumb copy & pasting of what has already been written – with a bit of rephrasing and reconnecting of a few dots that have started to jump out to me over the last 42 months or so. It's safe to say that none of this will work unless Jesus creates a whole avalanche of bread and fish out of the 5 crumbs of bread He gave me and the fried brain of one fish and the insatiable appetite for more that I have ...