Craig Healy on The Pull Request

[Craig Healy]

Thanks, AGM. Great discussion. I've held this chat in my mind after listening to the interview via text-to-speech the day after The Pull Request notified me of its existence. Your questions were quite thoughtful and consistent with my curiosities.

Previously, your public discussion of conversion to Judaism resonated with me. Raised RC, I deviated from the faith while remaining confident of the necessity to understand its existence as a means to begin comprehending modernity.

Since reading Dominion shortly after its publication in '19 I think of it often; usually as a lense with which to view the virtual reality in which American Homo Sapiens experience occurs.

I view Christianity's likely Jewish Mystery Cult origin - and thus its link to Judaism's accumulated wisdom - as an essential truth. I'm rarely able to openly discuss this due to my perceived lack of fellow minds willing to consider the validity of this amateur theologian's opinion.

If they're noticed at all, the waves my ideas generate in the fishbowls of the incurious within the context of their attempt to lead a personally meaningful life are perceived as little more than ripples unable to breach their walls self-deception.

Self-deception, among man's most reliable strengths, is also among the greatest tools in any man's workbench and essential to man's greatest achievement, civilized cooperation.

With the leadership of self-deception we're able to convince ourselves and fellow Homo Sapiens of the ridiculous. Our capabilities not limited to deception, beyond those lucky few able to remain ignorant of anything outside themself, include an uncanny ability to hold the wool firmly over our own eyes as a means with which to avoid uncomfortable thoughts including:

>The human condition is terminal.

>If not entirely pointless, existence is, at most, utterly insignificant.

>Either nothing happens for any reason or, if you prefer, outside of a predetermined future over which we exert no *libertarian* control.

These are dangerous ideas. As potentially dangerous today as the words and actions attributed to, whether factually spoken or recorded as having been said mythically, the Christian Savior over two millennia ago.

I reached my understanding of Christianity while enduring mostly subconcious survivors' guilt daily following a near fatal event which made me question,

"Why me?

Why did I survive?

Was I spared?

If so, by whom or what; and why?

And how was no one else's physical well-being also immediately effected by this event?"

In my self-directed attempt to determine whether these questions are answerable, I've been attempting since '05 to holistically define the water in which we swim.

Ehrman's lectures and writing helped me begin understanding how the sea was filled.

Holland's framing of the "individual soul" - both as a Christian creation and the foundation upon which the Western world exists - allowed me to appreciate its depth.

And carrier's hypothesis of Judaism's separation following its collision with Zoroastrianism into Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and what eventually became Islam assists my appreciation for the variations in the sea's temperature.

The greatest gift this knowledge has bestowed upon me is a certain quiet confidence in my strategy to be kind, love, and ask "why" less, if at all.