I confess that I joined the Navy at the age of 17 in large part because I wanted guidance in how to live. I was not raised by my mother or father, for reasons I won’t go in to here, but to this absence I attribute the absence of a certain assurance in my path that I felt I should have but didn’t. Joining the Navy was to me an appeal, from the mixed messages that had up till then buffeted me back and forth, to an authority that I knew was widely respected by “society.”<\/p>\n
In looking back on my life thus far, I detect the same pattern of recurring appeals to higher authority. There was my interest in high school in the so-called Great Books of the Western World, culminating in my realization after reading The Brothers Karamazov<\/em> during my first year in the Navy that the Bible was, by all of the criteria which made the Great Books “Great,” the Greatest of the Great Books. This realization in turn led to my enlistment in the Roman Catholic Church, which in turn led to my enlistment in a traditionalist and schismatic sect of the Roman Catholic Church. Life and study and reflection eventually led me to reject virtually all authority in matters of religion, and to believe that if God is to be found he’s to be found within. So from one point of view I’m not much better off today than that poor lost 17-year old kid who foolishly joined the Navy.<\/p>\n