Why I was an atheist and anarchist in 1967-69

For a brief time in my life (age 17- 19) I was an anarchist and an atheist. I say "brief time" but those two years felt like ten years at the time.

An anarchist wants to bring down the "house" of the human world, because it seems cruel and pointless and full of rules that constrain the best, or purer impulses of humanity. An anarchist does not necessarily want to hurt anyone, only structures that seem rotten or static or exclusionary or just wrong. So it was that when I was a Junior in highschool (to be accurate, starting in the summer of '68) with one more year of school before what should have been my ecstatic release from the low-security prison of public school, and what should have been the beginning of the adventure of my adult life, instead, what loomed was a free-fall into the yawning jaws of the expanding pit of my country's experiment with world-domination (Vietnam), which flew in the face of everything I believed in and longed for - love, community, freedom, poetry, art, friendship, healing, communing with nature, traveling, and dreaming of starting a family some day. So instead of being excited about graduation I was spending my time trying to figure out how to short-circuit the insanity of being tied to a country that seemed hell-bent on ruining my life and undermining my dreams.

Anarchy was all I had left. I wasn't into throwing bombs, but, rather, it felt like I was tied to a bomb - the frozen but ticking, unstable time-bomb of the white-centric American dream, which to me was waxing into a waking nightmare.

Literally everything seemed to be vulnerable to the powerful shock-waves of weaponized capitalism. For example - my town was coming apart at the seams. There was heavy (binge) drinking, sit-ins at the University, suicides, divorces, wild parties (often with LSD) that seemed to exude the sentiment, live now, for tomorrow we die! I had to get out.

I filed for a CO (1-0 classification, opposed to all military service, available for alternative non-military service) and headed for the Navaho Reservation, as a volunteer at Navaho Community College, Many Farms AZ.

In filing for my CO, I had to wrestle with the question, did I actually believe in a "supreme being", a requirement for qualifying for CO status. See, the application for CO was slanted toward a Christian paradigm of what it means to be religious. I, being young and idealistic, and honest could not bring myself to say that I believed in a single Creator when I didn't . . . or in any kind of supreme being, who, for example, created humans to resemble His or Its- self. I couldn't even conceive of a Creator having a self! Wasn't the self what was causing all of the trouble in the basic schematic of human creation? I did, however believe in the sanctity of life, and the sacred nature of the universe, but, since I was low on answers at the time, and unsure of anything except that I didn't want to kill, and wanted to live a full life, I was drawn to the only world view that made sense, skepticism and a kind of seat-of-the-pants anarchism.

Based on how the University was faring and my town, and the volatile unrest in many American cities, like Chicago and Detroit and LA and Atlanta, I really thought everything was about to fall apart anyway, so anarchy just made sense. The part of me that was escaping the prison of high school, and sought the relief of the American desert, was focused on survival, pure and simple.

It was when I got out to the desert, which turned out to be a kind of 3-month monastic alone-time of communing with my soul, that I began to believe in something that seemed larger than nature, and larger than humanity. I couldn't name it, because it was mysterious, but I had to open to it, because, not only my survival, but all my dreams depended on it. Basically I am saying that the desert initiated me.

When I returned from Navaho Country I was no longer an anarchist and I was no longer an atheist. But I knew I had a very powerful fully functional conscience that was somehow connected to my equally powerful heart and I was beginning to realize that I had a soul, even though I couldn't say what a soul was.

So what is the relationship between anarchy and atheism? (I can only speak for my anarchy and my atheism.) Anarchy expressed my lack of faith in rules and the institutions that upheld and enforced them, like the public school system that had squelched my spirit, and the draft and my local draft board and my mother's church and the university that was firing professors and expelling students. And atheism, for me, was lack of belief in a "supreme being" or a single Creator who sided with human beings.

When I began to believe in rules again, I saw them as expedient, never beyond revising or editing or replacing with better rules, and when I began to be a believer (in an intelligent universe), which happened by degrees, it came about because I was learning how to live more fully with an open heart, following my conscience and, yes, communing with nature.

So that is a little of my brief but intense journey through anarchy and atheism. I will just end by stating that there is still a little bit of the anarchist in me, in the wings, but there is none of the atheist left. I still have a lot to learn about what this Earth walk holds, for me, for all of us.