Speaker 1 Music. Speaker 2 Well, I started going to church when I was about 14 years old, and I spent a couple of years as a friend of echo. Mormon became an agnostic. Speaker 1 So your religious belief did start with mormonism. Speaker 2 Yeah, I was about the 7th grade and well, no, I started with methodism, actually. Closest church around with methodism. So they I would go to methodist and round up all the kids in the block, and we would get a method of Sunday school. I was really into this religion. My parents would take me to church and leave me off and come to church afterwards and pick me up, but neither of them wanted anything to do with the mormonism themselves. So were they at these no, my grandfather had kind of a religion of his own, which he believed in god, and if you were good, you'd be treated right in the next life and all this, but a very simple thing. And I think that was basically I know that was basically my mother's religion, and it really didn't have a name. Eisenhower republican. Speaker 1 Okay, that's the first thing that you were politically yeah. All right. An Eisenhower republican. Speaker 2 Yeah. I I agree with every editorial in Los Angeles mirror, bridge, so thinkley wrote more authoritarian, middle of the rooms and conservatives. And it was in the military that my view was changed. Just before I went into the military, I discovered the first unitarian church in Los Angeles, and I was very left where you got a story on pages, and I just rather liked their attitude. There was a pamphlet there called unitarianism a three time loser, describing how the church had failed to evolve on three different occasions towards greater tolerance and away from racism and so forth. And I just liked that can door. But grade sent me a card postcard a few years back, and it said on it the question, what do you get when you cross a unitarian with jehovah's witness and answer someone who wanders door to door for no apparent reason? You kind of always wind up with the unitarians. You kind of feel like, why is this a church? It's a church for people who don't believe in god or something, basically. But at one time, big thing, because the unitarians believe there was only one god and not a trinity, and that's what it was all over why they were called unitarians were very persecuted for believing that god was not the marine corps with a bit of an interest in socialism and communism. Speaker 2 I remember my first unit when I went on active duty. I was sitting there one day reading a biography of wedding, and his sergeant walked by. Staff sergeant Christian signed his staff sergeant, and he says only, I looked the books you read sometimes, and I wonder about you. And I said, well, I'll know that enemy. And he said, well, I still wonder about you. And he walked out of the heart and I didn't know there was another staff sergeant sitting right behind me. Said to the guy next to me I've never met a group of people more proud of their own ignorance. And Staff Sergeant Susan, Marine Corps. Here's a guy who's willing to give his life fighting communism. He was willing to die, keep it and became everybody's way of life. I got a very disturbing statistic somewhere that said 60% of the people in the world went to bed hungry every night. I went to Manila when I was in the Philippines, on leave on a weekend. And one of the first things I saw when the cab driver left me off he left me off right next to the river. Poor section of the town. Speaker 2 City of walls, bombed out buildings that were bombed in the war where people lived in cardboard huts and so forth. And here's this man walking down the street in my direction who looks like a skeleton. I mean, he absolutely doesn't look like he's going to last another day or two. And if he passes me, I notice he has this real look at panic in his eyes. I always sort of imagined that as people started to that, their minds is all sort of faded away. But here he was, very alert and very afraid and very desperate looking. And the US. Had owned the Philippines until July 4, 1948, I believe it was. And this was going on. I just decided that my communist friend and Nick Granwich in San Francisco was right. That fill their stomachs and then worry about the civil liberties. Everybody would be responsible for creating the situation to be lined up in a shot. You could get very angry. And so I started reading books on communism. So I found this big, thick philosophical volume written by Jesuit about dialectical materialism. And so I read that at the same time I was reading the Bob Wood Gita. Speaker 2 They kind of seemed to me to be saying the same thing, which is, work hard and devote yourself to your duties and don't lust after results. Everybody will be happy and everything will be fine. And not long before I left, I was introduced to somebody else because they were an atheist, as was I. Same thing happened to us. Well, sketching with Mims. Yeah, I was one of those atheists. Speaker 1 You become a communist. Speaker 2 Well, I decided that when I came back to the United States the first thing I was going to do was contact Nick Granwich and ask him how it could be most useful. Because remember the Communist Party or the fellow traveler? Somebody said, hey, Carrie, there's another atheist in the outfit. Do you want a meeting? I said yeah. And they just merged our outfit with a couple of others and a lot of new people. And somebody took me over. His name was MIM. M-I-M. He said. Ryan Oswald has said communism is my religion. Said this book here in my Bible and it was out shrugged and he turned a gulps oath I will spend no part of my life for another man or ask any other man to spend any part of his life for me. My 1st 30th ethic I got it the epitome of amorality. And I was having a really hard time figuring out what kind of link between logic and ethics. There was no logical reason to be good and yet I wanted to be good and I wanted to punish people who were bad. I couldn't really justify it in terms of worldview. Speaker 2 I read Whitman when I was about 14 too. He had a big influence on me and through all these changes I decided to read Atlas, picked up a copy of the Oklahoma and started reading it on board ship a few days before I left and found it very convincing. But Simskill came by and he had been offending me from the officers that said I was a communist by saying he's more American than I am. He's more American than you are. Speaker 1 Before you really became a communist you moved right through that into the iron ran force. Speaker 2 Yeah, well, this thing a big change to me. I was in moving from scientific socialism to scientific capitalism. The important thing to me was that iron, random and atheist was the idea that there could be a morality based on rationality really appealed to me. That it's like building a bridge is the right way and the wrong way to build a bridge, and same with society, is the right way and the wrong way to destruct a society. And that gives you some basis to think of right and wrong and also dispensed in power of altruist morality, which was being a selfish thing. And I still feel content in my heart for altruist a lot of times. I went back to my base to get my belongings a couple of days before we sail from the processing barracks. I was in the acoustica and Bud walked up to me and he said well, if you decide what you're going to do when you get back to the state and I said yeah, I'm going to be a capitalist pig. And what I decided I would do is my big argument persuaded me in order for there to be enough production for you to feed everybody the producers had to be rewarded and so what if they got more than the other people because everybody was better off because they were in the world. Speaker 2 And so he was surprised and I showed him the book. Then I was reading it on the way back to the state. My only remaining doubt reading was maybe she wasn't an atheist because one scene there in Francisco Dencono destroys this Mexican village where Anaconda Copper was having.