I was born in Columbus, Ohioin the autumn of 1971. I was baptized Lutheran, but before I entered kindergarden my parents began attending Westgate Friends Meeting, where Don Green (a student of Elton Trueblood) was minister. When I was in the second grade my father felt called to be a Quaker minister, and we moved to Richmond, Indiana where he went to seminary at Earlham School of Religion. 

For the rest of my childhood, we moved between small towns in Ohio and Indiana, a few years in each place. I had a hard time making friends (though the ones I did make were strong friendships), so I spent much of my childhood in books. I would read almost anything, but especially loved science fiction. I read at home, on the bus, in class, in the woods behind the house, anywhere I could find a moment. I have amassed a big library since then, mostly books on religion(s). 

We finally ended up in North Carolina, where I graduated from High School. I was a band geek and a misfit, added to which was the rejection that comes from peers and their parents in North Carolina when one doesn't base their choice of friends on skin color. Because of my refusal to be racist (based on how mom and dad raised me) and my dad's rejection of the idea that me having brown friends was a problem, he was fired during my junior year of high school. It still boggles my mind that a group calling itself "Quaker" could do this! 

So in 1990, just as I was coming into adulthood, I was in spiritual turmoil.  I began dabbling in some occult practices, basically Wicca but I had no guidance.  Mostly I was just meditating and trying to connect with nature.  I was still going to a Quaker meeting with my family most Sundays (not at the one controlled by racists) but I was looking at things a little more abstractly.  When I could talk my parents out of making me go to church, I would attend the sysops meeting where folks from the local BBSs would get together.  Maybe its just a characteristic of adolescence, but I began to question everything, including my own beliefs, for the first time.  I hope I never lose the ability, the need, to do that.

Quaker ministers are not paid well, so even if dad had kept his job there was no money for college.  The family was preparing to move back to Ohio, I was preparing for graduation, and I had no Idea what came next.  I took the ASVAB test and got the highest score possible, so recruiters were calling all the time.  Thinking about how wonderful the Marine Corps band is, I talked to their recruiter and auditioned with the band director, but when I figured out the recruiter was lying to me I scrapped the Marine idea.  The Navy recruiter started telling me about the cash bonuses available for their "Nuclear Program," so I took that test, passed, and signed an agreement.  The day after graduation, my family moved to Ohio, and a few days after that I was in boot camp.

The only spiritual meeting I attended in boot camp (Sunday mornings you can go to the chapel or sit in the compartment) was the Muslim one.  It was interesting but I didn't go back.  I made a mental note to read the Quran after boot camp and spent the rest of my Sunday mornings shining my boots or studying my Bluejackets manual.  After boot camp I started NFAS (Nuclear Field 'A' School) in Orlando.  In Florida I found new age book stores, crystal shops and Santa Ria botanicas and no end of new info on fringe religions for me to absorb.  Before I had graduated from NNPS (Naval Nuclear Power School) I had changed my service record to reflect Wicca as my "religious preference."

After Power School, I was placed on medical hold, on which I remained until my discharge in '93.  A little over two years later I was at the lowest point in my life.  I had been medically retired from the US Navy the previous summer, and had just moved in with friends after an unpleasant breakup with my fiancée who was cheating on me for the second time.  Just for the record I want to say that she was the bright light in the darkness that my life had become by that point.  Her parents wisely gave her "Joy" as a middle name, and that most accurately describes what being with her made me feel until everything fell apart, and is what I think of when I am reminded of her today.  I have always seen my inability to work out that relationship as my biggest failing thus far in life.

For my last year and a half in the Navy the neurologist gave me a variety of drugs, most with side effects which were... well... let's just say detrimental to my psychological well-being.  After being given one drug (which years later I found out to be a powerful psychiatric medication being experimentally used for migraines) I was diagnosed with a possible seizure condition.  I was subsequently placed on another drug  (which I also later found out to be an even more powerful psychiatric medication being experimentally used for migraines).  I was being prescribed doses larger than those given to institutionalized psychotics.  To this day I feel like I was being used as a lab rat.  Its a good thing my introduction to Scientology was Dianetics and not CCHR.  Between the meds and the girl, I was an emotional wreck when I moved out.  (I stopped taking my meds about the same time I started reading Dianetics, but there was no conscious connection between the two.)

Readjusting to civilian life is much like coming out of a cult.  It is a different world, no one quite speaks your language, they don't get your jokes.  The identity you were given in the forge of boot camp is mostly stripped away, your access to that community becomes more or less limited.  Added to this is the challenge of finding work as a partially disabled vet, trained at Nuclear Field 'A' School and Naval Nuclear Power School, half of which's curriculum is classified.  I ended up working as a parking lot attendant with my fiancée and "the other man", and then catching circuit boards as they came out of the oven that baked the green coating on for $5.25 an hour.  Suffering from frequent migraines which make being in a brightly lit, incredibly loud factory environment impossible meant I wasn't getting rich.  

The complexities and nuances of Wicca and New Age practices didn't satisfy the intellectual lens through which I perceived my spiritual side.  Looking for some kind of results to quiet the empirical demands of my mind, I drifted more and more toward the occult.  By the time I was discharged I guess I was spiritually in a pretty dark place.  Though my fiancée was a witch, and her mother was a spiritualist, they mostly stuck to the white variety of the craft so I tried to keep them insulated from my darker excursions.  

"Mom" had taken me under her wing, helping me with my rune readings (I seemed to have a talent for it) and teaching me tidbits of folk wisdom and scrying methods.  She would often allude to some kind of ascended being she called "the Columns" but it was some kind of big secret "you're not ready for just yet."  She was slowly bringing together a small group of followers, after some drama/power-play had torn her last circle apart.  After "mom" and a bunch of her circle cornered a friend and I in the living room for an "exorcism" lasting a couple hours (plus one very uncomfortable moment when "mom" broke out her dad's Knights of Columbus sword) I made a silent decision not to believe a word she said.  Whatever she was up to clearly had no power over me, except her ability to manipulate her daughter.  

I had a passing interest in computer programming as a kid, and during and after NNPS I would lay in bed and run a nuclear reactor in my head, trying to keep track of all the variables: temperatures, pressures, changes in rod positions and etc.  After reading some of Leary's writings on reprogramming your own mind a year or so before, I had been contemplating the mind as biological technology, being accessible and programmable.  These ideas were easily integrated with my occult pursuits, and soon I was actively engaged in trying to change my reality through sheer force of will.  Other than a few visionary experiences (totally explainable by science, I'm sure) and some minor physical... um... symptoms.. which could also be explained away as psycological/mind over body thing or the continued influence of the crazy drugs the navy had had me on, but which I took at least as evidence of my ability to program myself to some degree, I still was searching for a measurable effect.  

The reality I was trying to construct for myself began to take on a nightmarish, albeit beautiful, life of its own.  My fiancée was advising me on herbal teas, extracts, and balms to try to help with my headaches and depression (in retrospect caused at least in part by the meds).  Between all the tinkering with my chemistry, and all the drama, I was in a vulnerable emotional state when I started reading Dianetics.

 

So anyway the last stage of my moving out of her place was retrieving my books and unpacking them in my room in my friends' apartment near Lake Eola, the neighborhood where Jack Kerouac once lived.  While unpacking the boxes and constructing shelves from milk crates, my foot locker, and an aluminum table, I came across a copy of Dianetics which I had purchased some time before from a used book store, but never read.  Recalling that my father, a sci-fi enthusiast, had once mentioned it while we talked about the Dune books, I set it aside for perusal.  He had said some people accused Frank Herbert of trying to start a religion, but the much inferior book by Hubbard read like sci-fi and became a religion.  I had bought it thinking it would be funny, but now I had a new perspective, and nothing left to lose but what was left of my sanity.

Over the following weeks I slowly worked through it.  I found myself attracted to its ideas about valences and their rolls in human communication and actions.  I thought I could recognize at least some of this in what was going on with me, my ex-fiancée, and "the other man", and other areas of my life.  I liked the idea of taking the emotional charge off of key phrases that cause us to react negatively.  I began to try to apply some of the principles to get my life back where I wanted it.  At that point in my life I even liked his talk about using technology to become a superior species.  I was too wrapped up in my own head to think of the implications of that.  When Hubbard would try to sound scientific, sometimes it just didn't sound right to me, but I wrote this off as being related to how my civilian trained friends often used different terms, had different symbols for common variables, and etc. than I had learned at NFAS & NNPS.  The illusion of "science" in DtMSMH was a big selling point for me.

I found out there was a Church of Scientology in Orlando and I considered going there, but decided to finish the book and see if it helped at all; after all, everyone I talked to had said only the first visit is free.  I thought that was weird, but still continued studying and trying to apply this new technology.  I tried auditing myself, and then had my roommate help me run some of the Dianetics processes.  It didn't work.  Everything continued to swirl around the downward spiral.  My migraines got worse, and I had a full on seizure (fortunately in a room full of friends).  So after applying Dianetics my 1st dynamic was going even more wonky, my 2nd dynamic went to hell, my 3rd dynamic was incomprehensibly chaotic, and I was in fear of my 4th dynamic.  I was done.  Needless to say, I never set foot in the Orlando Org, though I did look in the window.  I put the copy of Dianetics back in the book shelf and didn't read it again until I went to college in 2001 to study comparative religions.  

While I was in college I took a new religious movement class and started studying Scientology a little.  I published what I learned on my web page, and long story short I got a cease and desist letter from CoS's lawyers and a few days later they had my cable internet shut down for two weeks while I tried to prove to my ISP that I wasn't doing anything wrong.  Between the lawyers' letter and their obvious power to shut me down, they managed to scare me into silence.  I continued to study, quietly, for several years.  

Before my father died, I began to take another look at my Quaker roots, and then a year or so later started attending Mass with a Catholic friend.  After studying the catechism and Catholic apologetic writings for a year or so I decided to join the Catholic church, though still holding firmly to many of the Quaker testimonies.

It was then, at Easter when I was formally entering the RCC that Anonymous showed up, and their complaint about CoS trying to stop free speech soon lead to their discovery of other abuses.  I joined them in their protests, and began studying even more.  Because my name is already known by the CoS, I get permits and talk to the police on behalf of local Anons.  We have been talking with the police since before our first protest, making sure they know what to expect and that we know our rights and responsibilities.  

I read all the new basics books (you can often get them for $1 apiece at a library sale), a few other LRH books, HCOBs, HCOPLs, listened to many of his lectures, and read the accounts of those who have managed to get out.  I took a long hard look at the "PTS/SP" course and materials, Hubbard's weird stats system, and "ethics" in Scientology and WISE.  

I soon realized there was a pattern of abuse in Scientology's upper management, sea org and local orgs.  This troubled me deeply, and this spiritual unrest was only deepened by recent revelations of high ranking members of Scientology's upper management detailing the abuses they witnessed, were subjected to, and even perpetrated on others themselves.  People should be able to practice their religions without fear of being physically, mentally, financially or spiritually abused.  I will continue to protest, applying what we have affectionately come to call "Gandhi-tech," until I am convinced the abuse has stopped.  

For some time now I have been reaching out to the Staff of the local Scientology Org, asking for a meeting with them to have a civil discussion.  I'm not so crazy as to think I can't be wrong, so I've offered to give them a chance to show me where I am wrong.  I've even had a police detective extend the offer for me, with the option that he be present for the meeting if that is what they wish (they have called us "terrorists" but I doubt even they believe that ludicrous claim), but they have chosen not to accept any of these offers to date.  I will continue to do this as well.  Since beginning to speak out about Scientology, I have been stalked, insulted, intimidated, and photographed more than a pop icon at a night club by Scientologists.

I have recently come to have a deepening of my issues (all thinking Catholics have them, I believe) with the Catholic Church.  I do not feel Pope Benedict has done or said the right things, the necessary things, to deal with a scandalous (in the orthodox theological sense) situation he was involved in.  The Hierarchy needs to admit it scandalized the Bishops by telling them not to immediately report the crimes to the civil authorities to which we are subject. This in turn scandalized priests held to the same rule, and victims for whom justice was delayed or denied. This in turn has lead to scandalizing the public, who are now seeing the results of the cover-ups. It all could have been avoided by doing the non-scandalous thing, obeying the law and turning cases of abuse over to civil authorities promptly.  The Catholic hierarchy, all the way to the top, need to repent and make public expiation. The laity needs to confront this head-on and not defend sinful policies or the actions that created them.

All these things, and more I've not thought of, have contributed to making me the Friend (or the Catholic-Quaker if there can be such a thing) I am today.