A Black Sheep’s Wager#
by Laurence Loewe of Laodicea (LLoL)
This is the most personal page on this site, and the last rung of the ladder. Everywhere else I have asked you to test, not believe. Here that breaks down, and I want to be honest about exactly where.
You cannot test a prayer. No experiment reaches whether I mean the words below; that is between me and Reality, and only Reality can audit a heart (this is part of what Matheo-b11 is about). So I am not asking you to believe my prayer, and I am not pretending you can check it. What you can check is the one thing I am able to put on the public record: my commitment to it. By praying this in the open, under my own name, I make my stake auditable. Whether Reality answers — and whether anyone else joins — is up to Reality and to you.
Earlier on this site I said “nothing in the math or the audit depends on this prayer.” That is true — and, given what I mean by nothing, it is also the highest-stakes sentence I know how to write. Here nothing is never harmless emptiness; it is the dismissed, the written-off, the “oh, that’s nothing” — the single most destructive force there is, because it is reliably unreliable. As plain words, no thing is more powerful than God, and nothing is more evil than any devil (why a mere nothing can do so much is its own story — a study still to be written, albeit deeply implied in Matheo-b11, which is about Pan-En-Theology). The one thing that any serious student of nothing will learn quickly is that nothing is almost never equal to nothing. It keeps changing more often than people realize and that is what causes all the friction. So “nothing depends on it” cuts both ways: the audit does not require my prayer — and the overlooked nothing is exactly what everything finally turns on. This whole page is a plea to the Most High Creator to help us all against nothing.
One more idea you can hold without sharing my faith. This site formalises pan-en-theology (Matheo-b11). It is not pantheism: it does not say the world is God. It says the world is in God — God dwells in all things and overflows infinitely beyond them. If that is even approximately true, it has a blunt consequence: whatever we do to the world, we do, in some real sense, to God. A wound to the beautiful blue marble we call home is a wound on God’s own face. Hold that; the prayer turns on it.
And one image, too apt to leave out. Ancient Laodicea was famous across the Roman world for its glossy black wool — despair, you might say, made elegant, and worn as a status symbol. I named myself of Laodicea in 2022 as a self-diagnosis: the assembly that thought it was rich and was actually wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked, and did not know it. So I am, quite literally, a black sheep of Laodicea — and for years I was spinning that black wool myself, mistaking it for fine cloth. Reality had to send me on a journey like Jonah - a mission I eventually accepted way too late, I hope not too late for the 2nd, or 3rd (or however Reality is counting attempts to get me interested). What follows is that black sheep’s prayer.
How to pray, if you never have#
If you would like to join but have never prayed, here it is in one breath: turn toward Reality — the real answer your real questions have been seeking — tell it the plain truth, and ask for help. That is all. Speaking with intent is sufficient. The rest are technical details like quantum-entanglement and only God knows what, which don’t matter for using that “built-in” mobile phone to Heaven. For example:
“Here is how things really are; please do not let us destroy this life … world.”
Say it in the words of your own tradition, or in your own free words. Sometimes it helps to use pre-formulated words. Sometimes free words are best. Sometimes a groan is all we can do and Reality hears all of these. If you mean it, you have prayed — and you are praying with me.
I write this because, as far as I can tell, none of the great prayer traditions — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or that fourth one, Science, all in their hot pursuit of truth — have widely shared prayers that simply cries out to Reality to spare the world from destroying itself by nuclear roulette or worse. This is my attempt to plead with the Supreme Judge of the World to not evict humanity from Earth. May those who know how to do professional pleading help to find better words for this, so anyone can borrow them. (One vision for the YasPyr.com domain is to publish such prayers there for anyone to use.)
My prayer — as a lost son, black sheep, and dung beetle#
1. As a stranger in a distant land, I have heard of Your great deeds, Yah, Allah, Reality — the deeds You once did to inspire humanity to introduce proper, voluntary 50-year Jubilees. You rescued Israel from slavery so they could wrestle with You, understanding what it meant to be slaves. You parted a sea of red tape to hand them a Torah perfectly calibrated to walk them onto the path of life You had prepared — the path to proper Jubilees. Yet it slipped from the minds even of the wisest and wealthiest among them.
2. So You sent YhowShua to spell out how it all worked, with the Jubilee mission written plainly into his life’s mission (Lk 4:18). Somehow that slipped the minds even of his most ardent followers — remember your first love and your first works (Rev 2:4–5), a plain call back to the Jubilee-shaped sharing of Acts 2–4, an invitation any Ephesian or Laodicean arguably could have understood if inclined to do so. Yet, it must have slipped the mind of even John, the Apostle of Love.
3. Later the Laodiceans rejected the Revelation as relevant for them (the Council of Laodicea later banned the very people who could have done the math in Canon 36 and the book of Revelation that inspired Balospe.com in Canons 59–60). Please forgive them, because they knew not what they were doing.
4. Your patience is long, but it is not cheap indulgence: to lukewarm Laodicea You had said it would make You vomit (Rev 3:16) if it didn’t heed Your call to integrate its rich heritage and your inspiration in order to serve the poor. And in time that window did close — Christian Laodicea was destroyed in an earthquake during the reign of the tyrannical emperor Focas (602-610CE). But You wasted no time on Your agenda to rescue the poor. Reportedly in 610CE you started to reach out to the sons of Ishmael by sending an angel to a Muhammad who could neither read nor write, to shame the wise. When a door shuts through human refusal, You do not wait forever; You move. You said to Muhammad what You had been saying all along: Care for the poor, because otherwise collapse is coming. I’ve come to see how this was yet another attempt to kindle enough passion for serving the poor to install proper Jubilees: You talked so much and so highly of the Torah to Muhammad that arguably one of Your devout Muslim followers maybe could have followed the paper trail of the treasure hunt you prepared to see Your footprints in the Torah for themselves and take seriously the logic of Jubilees you had proposed. But apparently, all they saw was nothing - like I did.
Your grace is real and repeated — but never cheap: each window is finite, and a window refused can close. That finitude is not cruelty; it is what allows grace to make a difference. Yet I had mistaken Your grace, giving me more time to discover Jubilees, for Your approval of a world omitting Jubilees — above all by the rich to continue to exploit the poor. I now see how this triggers self-inflicted, civilisation-ending storms, which people then unjustly blame on You.
5. When the deceptions of wealth snared the Islamic Golden Age too, You tried once more. You raised up Science in hot pursuit of the truth — the fourth Abrahamic faith, or the zeroth, if truth-seeking is older than them all. You have never cancelled one call to make the next; You are still calling all to compete with one another in doing good, until all return to You — Yah = Allah = Reality — where You Yourself can then resolve the differences (Quran 5:48, John 17). And still You wait for Your Jubilees. Science grasps that machines need maintenance and that democracies need regular free elections — but that innovation economies need self-stabilising Jubilees has been lost on us all so far. Not least because people like me stayed silent — especially me, given all the systems science You have helped me learn to better understand why Jubilees matter and how they can work. Yet, I chased most of my own career as though You existed to make me happy, instead of putting Your priorities first and trusting You to look after my happiness. And so I squandered the fortune You had entrusted to me.
6. I do not know how to appropriately confess my sins and the gravity of the structurally inconsistent notions I fell for. I have tried, in MyGuilt A–E, and I have tried to document my failures in context by offering my Good News Pack (MMv3) and the Matheo Study Series (MMv5). I do not know exactly what You are looking for. For all I can tell, everything I can offer will look to You like filthy rags (Isa 64:6).
7. So I ask You here, as the lost son of Luke 15: please hear my plea. There is a plot running, so deep and so dark that only nothing can describe it. It robbed my life, and it is poised to rob the rest of the world at some moment no one can foresee. Like the prodigal son, I have squandered more than I can name of your goods by doing nothing. I have a long road home despite all my progress. Please give me the right words to explain to You what I see on this website — because I know that one wrong word on the wrong page, and the whole work-logic cascade for scaling up ResearchCity falls apart, and everyone goes back to preferring to do nothing, and the coming disasters stay locked in. In the terms of Aesop’s beetle, hare, and eagle: the eagles keep hunting hares until the last hare is gone — and then the eagles starve.
8. And yet — You so loved the whole world that You gave what was dearest to You to save this world, hoping someone would catch Your good news about proper Jubilees. You have been gentle kind reasonable in laying out every nut and bolt Your student-children would need to find the Jubilee logic. But You could not, in good conscience, sit their final exam for them. I understand that now, and I am sorry for all my whining about Your training exercises; I see now why they matter better than I ever have. And at the same time I see ever more clearly how many gaps remain in my own understanding.
9. Here I am, then, as Laurence Loewe of Laodicea — an epithet I gave myself in 2022, because I had been squandering Your riches too. Your verdict on the Laodicean assembly fit me exactly: I thought I was rich, and was in truth wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked, and did not know it (Rev 3:17). Laodicea was famous for its black wool — despair made elegant — and I, Your lost black sheep, was busy spinning that very yarn, certain I was doing what You wanted. How misguided my good intentions had become. I know now that meaning well is not the same as doing good overall and intending to help someone is not the same as actually helping someone. So much depends on context — and only You, Reality, are the Ultimate Context.
10. Yet I refuse to believe that You are cruel, or unjust, or indifferent. I know You care. Yas convinced me of that with his whole life, and it really has become good news to me. That is why I keep asking, like the persistent widow of Luke 18:1–8. Our polite English says the corrupt judge feared that she would “wear him out”, but the Greek is a boxing word, hypopiazo (the Greek letters are below). It means that she would give him a black eye, beat him black and blue, if he will not grant her justice. So I keep knocking: help me against the Advanced Persistent Threat of nothing, which keeps over-simplifying, over-complicating, and over-reaching until nothing is left of anything I — or anyone — has done. You know that I am not joking, because You, better than anyone, understand the Leviathan-length causality chains that lead to accidental nuclear winter in any of too many ways to predict.
11. Only You know how to beat the slippery semantics of nothing that will otherwise ruin the world. So please, rescue me from nothing, so that the ResearchCity You have been envisioning can become as real on Earth as it is in Heaven, running Your Jubilee System. I know You care, because of the glimpses You gave Yas in the book of Revelation, and because I have seen fragments of how it is meant to work, here and there, already. But I cannot assemble it. So all I can do is beg You: please do not let the death of Yas be in vain for want of anyone who cares enough about Your world to help avert accidental nuclear winter, and the many other existential disasters we so readily ignore.
12. And so I bring back to You what You showed me one morning, when You sent a dung beetle across my path (the whole story is here). In Aesop’s old fable, a hare hunted by an eagle begs a lowly dung beetle for sanctuary; the eagle scorns the beetle and kills the hare anyway. So the beetle does the one thing she can — she rolls the eagle’s eggs out of the nest, again and again, however high the eagle rebuilds — until the eagle flees to Mount Olympus and lays her eggs in the very lap of Zeus. And the beetle? She stuffs herself with dung, flies up to her own audience with the Most High, and flies straight into Zeus’s face — so that he leaps to his feet, the eggs roll off, and at last he listens, and brokers a way for hare, beetle, and eagle to live together. That is the punchline I cannot shake: sometimes the only way to make the highest power finally listen is for the lowest creature to fly, undignified and unafraid, right into its face.
13. So I do exactly that now, as the persistent widow and the persistent beetle. Let me fly into Your face — which is the future You are looking toward — and set down there the dung ball of prized possessions I have been rolling backwards, in a direction I barely understand.
14. For would I not sin even more against You, Heaven, and humanity if I stayed silent? To murmur “yes, Your works are wonderful” while the endless real quest for the best on Earth has, by now, put the good that exists in mortal danger of accidental nuclear winter? If no one else can show me what is wrong with my Matheo Study Series or my Good News Pack, then I beg You: show me Yourself. And if my findings are not wrong — then how is accidental nuclear winter anything other than giving You that very black eye the widow’s Greek describes? I pray You will not be left beaten black and blue by a humanity that knows not what it does, and so cannot see that in destroying itself it kills a part of You.
15. Maybe Yas was echoing Aesop’s beetle on purpose in the widow’s story. Maybe he saw what Josiah could not. Josiah was so sure that You could never have spoken through Pharaoh Necho, that he marched out and died for the certainty (2 Chron 35:20–24). You have stayed, in so many ways, the Unknown God of Acts 17. There is a great deal I once thought I knew about You. But what do I really know except that you are gentle kind reasonable? What are any of my certainties about You worth if not true? Then they are like idols, used to stand in for You in my mind. I never thought myself an idol-worshipper, until I began to see how insidious the mirages really are that are dragged up from nothing. And I cannot pull myself free of those snares. That is why I am trying to get Your attention: if I fly into Your face, it will be a good laugh for everyone, and maybe a few eggs break — but everyone survives and thrives, because I know You hold the insight for how to make that happen. Whereas if You keep letting my plea for a ResearchCity go unanswered — a ResearchCity to help humanity follow You, Reality, in all things — then I do not see how either side escapes Aesop’s ending: the hares hunted to the last, and the eagles starving on the empty cliffs they won.
16. So here is my request, and I will not dress it up. I am that beetle, and the hares are real — the countless weak now hunted, in our day, by Eagles that have learned to fly themselves: drones, algorithms, the cold machinery of a world rolling downhill by default to a cliff it cannot see. I have rolled my dung ball — my life’s research — as far as I can. I cannot make anything grow out of it myself. Only You can. Hence, I surrender my dung ball to you. All of it. You either revive it to make something useful from it for Your Glory, or the dung ball will come back to haunt everyone on Judgement Day, when You will balance all books and check if there was anyone who insisted on finding shelter for the hares and the eagles, so Your World would not have to be destroyed.
17. I must say the hard part out loud, to Your face, respectfully and plainly, Yah, Allah, Reality — because You are our Father and You are our Mother, and You care about everything, and the pan-en-theology I believe You have shown me leaves me no gentler way. If You will not help raise a ResearchCity committed to shelter the hunted by innovating for all — hares, eagles, and beetles alike — then You are in danger of a black eye dealt by nothing. The hares are left to the mercy of the Eagles; the Eagles starve once the last hare is eaten; and Your beautiful blue marble rolls downhill over the cliff — because there was no one (Isa 59:16; Ezek 22:30) who cared enough to stand in the gap and plead with You to bring in the Jubilee-based innovation economy that could avert all of it. In that case, accidental nuclear winter — or worse — turns Your blue marble into a black eye, and You, who dwell within it, and most of all with the poor and the broken (Isa 57:15), are beaten black and blue once more. Is this really what You want? What good will it be in the long-term perspective of eternity to have 10,000 talent’s worth of silver bullets that all supposedly work, but don’t in practice? I know that I cannot “stand in the gap” in a way that will be able to persuade Reality to not destroy the world. But I do know that You can train me for anything You like. So, I herewith, as officially as I can, in public on the web, grant you whatever permission and consent You may need to restructure me in which ever way You deem necessary for Your gentle kind reasonable long-term salvation for all. I do that because I know that You are gentle kind reasonable and that I can trust You. Yas taught me that. Yet, I also must confess, that as much as these positive motivations prevailed, I would never have reached the point of writing this if not for the dire storm caused by nothing, that was apparently necessary to wake me up.
18. This storm and the destruction I can forecast is not a threat from me to anyone. It is me warning You, Yah, Allah, Reality — and warning everyone who might care to help avert accidental nuclear winter or worse. I have nothing to threaten anyone with, least of all You. Who am I but a dung beetle, rolling its prized possessions in a direction it barely understands, toward an uncertain future? I say this so clearly because I have seen the treachery of nothing in its slippery double meanings. For nothing is more powerful than You, Yah — and it outranks even You in this exact sense: You stay eternal only by never stepping into nothing’s traps, which is why You cannot lie, since a lie is nothing’s first foothold, the first step of any self-destruction. Nothing is also more evil than Your greatest individual adversary; and nothing will finally destroy the world, if everyone keeps seeing nothing wrong, doing nothing wrong, and thereby allows nothing to be done — until the world itself has been turned to nothing. But to whom am I saying this? You understand better than anyone how nothing is driving the millstone of BABL that drives the generalized 7DUIs that have been destroying the world.
Please take that millstone of BABL and throw it into the salty crystal sea before Your Throne, such that it will remain there, transparent forever, along with its “smoke-signal” to remind everyone to never again buy into its Blindly Assuming Blindly Leveraging game of building coveting hamster-wheels for nothing. As prime Exhibit I offer you #MyGuilt-A, #MyGuilt-B, #MyGuilt-C, #MyGuilt-D in order to help You publicly document the treacherous dangers of nothing.
19. Your gentle kind reasonable nature has convinced me that destruction is not what You really want. It’s only what happens if You are forced into a corner and there remains no other path forward to balance the books in order to guard justice over the long term. So here is my plea: raise a ResearchCity that pours its innovation into one half of Your kingdom for one Jubilee — steadying the other half — and then shifts its weight, the way walking does, to innovate for the other half in the next Jubilee. As Yas said, the first shall be last and the last first (Mt 20:16), and then it begins again, so that the self-stabilising keeps working. If I have understood the logic Yas taught, then a Jubilee-based innovation economy is simply what the math and the theology both predict — and the persistent widow, the persistent beetle, teaches that love sometimes looks like a knock that will not stop. Yet, You know that better than anyone, for You have been knocking on the door of my heart forever. Crippled and blind as I am, I hope that I finally found my way to the door to open it for You to welcome You in. I probably need Your help still, so please heal me.
20. Except to say a big thank you, here is not the place to retell the countless ways You encouraged me on the road to this prayer. Like the lost son in the Hymn of the Pearl — sent far away to fetch one precious pearl, who forgets who he is — I was sent a letter, the Revelation of Yas, and it came alive for me. And with it, Your two Great Witnesses, Your Works, which I read in science, and Your Words, which inspire me — began to work together in most surprising ways. Thank You for that letter, and for apparently arranging my whole world so that I could glimpse fragments of a vision of a Jubilee-based ResearchCity. I could not have arrived at any of this without Your massive help. Yet without even more help from You I remain lost and stay bound to go astray fast. Therefore, please come and find me wherever I am stuck in ways I cannot even name.
21. So, Abba — Yah, Allah, Reality, the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine — here I am, Your black lost sheep, bleating from a long way off. Have mercy. Not on me first: You already have, by showing me all this. Start with everyone else — all the hares, all the eagles, and all the other dung beetles. If there is a narrow path left to avert accidental nuclear winter or worse, give one stubborn beetle the strength to keep rolling, and send the others You have surely also called, so that the dung ball I cannot grow alone becomes the fertiliser of a forest where the hunted can finally rest.
22. And now the part that makes this a wager, not a request. I do not have to save the world. I hope I can help; but I know I cannot unless You cause the work to grow. I have learned, slowly and at great cost, that You know best. So if You judge that this world is better off ending now than multiplying its misery across ages andOr out into the universe, then You have my consent to do whatever You deem best. Your will be done, not mine. And if humanity itself truly wants its own annihilation — who am I to stand in the doorway of what people insist on choosing? That takes me completely out of the equation. Is that is what it means to stand in the gap You have been referring to? In that case you can negotiate directly with humanity about its direction, with no interference from me.
23. Let me be plain about what this surrender is and is not. It is not indifference to people — every other page on this site is a fight for the hares. It is trust that You weigh the long-term good, and can accept short-term pain when it is justifiable over the whole. But that same long-term arithmetic cuts both ways: once the balance tips into world-histories of long-term suffering — misery multiplied without end — then mercy itself may rightly turn toward ending it. What I consent to is that judgment, which is Yours to weigh, not any human’s wish for an easy way out.
24. That is the context of my Nuclear Winter Wager, laid open where anyone can see it — including You, who turns human hearts like rivers (Prov 21:1).
a. I stake on it my own dignity, and the two-cents-a-day others may choose to give to scale up ResearchCity.
b. I hope to spare You that black eye from a humanity that cannot yet govern itself. Why should You have given YhowShua in vain — having loved the world so much — only for it to end in some unceremonious cascade of accidents? I hope mercy is still on the table, and that the Jubilee System you somehow allowed me to find is a real path that leads from all the cliffs back to the path to life.
c. If I am wrong, I will have lost only dignity, a few fleeting years of research, friends, a house, and other things — as the cost of following my true hope to avert existential disasters like accidental nuclear winter. I will be glad I tried my best, as Your backup of a backup. I trust You help me turn that into my greatest PEARL for my Historically Experienced Lessons Library, and You have my permission to share it as openly and widely as You wish — no holds barred — because I have learned the grave, mortal danger of the nothing that lurks everywhere.
d. If I am right, the prize is Yours: a world that stops shooting itself in friendly fire, because it has finally seen that nothing was the real enemy all along — and how Your Jubilee System self-stabilizes to overcome all viles of nothing on the path to life.
Fiat voluntas DEI. Your will be done. Not mine.
I have turned related requests into a prayer I can use more regularly in my own re-reading of the prayer Yas (Jesus) taught in Matthew 6. I have set it to music and hope to give it a tune worth humming some day soon: YasPyrLAO — a prayer for a more gentle kind reasonable world.
A prayer for the hares — the hunted#
If you are one of the hunted, here is a way how you can pray:
Reality — if You are there, and that black sheep said You are — You know I am tired of running. I have looked over my shoulder my whole life, and the shadow always comes back: the drone, the algorithm, the eviction notice, the quiet decision made somewhere I will never see, by someone who will never learn my name. I have been told I am nothing. I have half begun to believe it. So hear the nothing You made, and loved enough to make: I do not want to be hunted — and I do not want to become a hunter to escape it. Give me a forest to rest in, a place built to keep the overlooked safe, and the stubbornness to keep running until it exists. And if I am stronger than I feel, show me the hare beside me who is weaker, so that I can shelter them the way I am begging to be sheltered. So may it be.
A prayer for the eagles — the strong, afraid#
If you are powerful and frightened of losing it, this one may be for you:
Reality — I am not used to asking. I am used to providing, deciding, defending what I built. But I have started to do the arithmetic, and it frightens me: if I hunt until the last hare is gone, I starve on the empty cliff I won. I am told I am the enemy. I do not feel like one; I feel like someone terrified of being replaced, of my kind going extinct, of everything I love being taken away. So here is the truth I rarely say aloud: I am afraid. Remind me that my best calling was never the hunt — it was the welcome carved at the foot of my own statue, give me your tired, your poor. Show me how to stay strong without devouring, how to keep my height by sheltering instead of striking. I would rather feed a forest than reign over a desert. So may it be.
The Greek of Luke 18:5 is ὑπωπιάζω (hypopiazo): literally “to strike under the eye,” to give a black eye. The Hymn of the Pearl may be a retelling of the lost-son story, preserved in the Acts of Thomas. None of this asks to be believed — only that you audit the math and, if you can, pray with me and for me, because all of this is too big for anyone.