What kind of God would let children starve, I argued, or people get cancer, or the Holocaust happen?
During college, a lot of what I learned from professors was definitely extra-curricular. I left school to grow vegetables, but I don’t remember ever growing any. There are a lot of things from those years I can’t remember. Like a lot of people at that time—late 60s, early 70s—I was pretty wild. Whatever sounded outrageous, I wanted to do. And usually, I did. I didn’t know what to do with my life, though I remember my parents kept begging me to do something. There was some huge rock of self-loathing sitting in the middle of my stomach during those years, and it got worse with every phase I went through. As my pain deepened, so did my interest in philosophy. I always sensed there was some mysterious cosmic order to things, but I could never figure out how it applied to my own life. I believed other people were dying inside too, just like me, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about it. I kept thinking there was something very important that no one was discussing. I didn’t have the words
