Some of you are puzzled as to why I am somewhat defensive of the brothers…this is for you.

I don’t view the Roberts group the way they view themselves. If I were allowed to do so, I would definitely
lobby for changes within the group that I think are vital. It so happens that I am not particularly optimistic
about the likelihood, even if I were 100% correct in the areas I differ with them, (and I am not saying that I
am,) that they are very open to change. I don’t think they are looking all around how they could change to
be closer to the center of God’s perfect will. That is as far as I really care to go right now.

I want to express that if it were not for that group, I would be in a much sorrier state. Maybe I would have
lost my mind, maybe I would be dead, who really knows. All I know, is that when I needed them to be
there, to show me something that was true beyond all reasonable doubt, in a confusing, messed up world,
they were on point.

It seems like a lot of people join the Roberts group for all kinds of reasons. I don’t know what the reasons
are. They seem to collect a lot of riff-raff, and sometimes people just become riff-raff within the confines of
the group. All I know for certain is the reason why I joined the group. So this is what I am here to say.

I met brother Jonathan in the fall of ’94. He wheeled a sharp looking KHS mountain bike up to me as I sat
in Renaissance square, a small park along the Guadalupe “drag”, a street facing the UT campus that caters
to the college kids in Austin. I was nineteen. When I first looked up, I saw Jonathan’s beard, and
immediately took him for a homeless person. Then, eyeing him up and down, it seemed that he was
absolutely spotless; I realized he could not have possibly have been homeless.

His countenance was also astonishing. It smacked of learned intelligence. Of Wisdom. He talked to me for
some time about how the brothers lived, how they got by, and I saw so much truth in it. It seemed to me
that here was a group of people that had it all figured out, and here I was, alone, trying to figure it out in my
head but essentially doing nothing about it, whatever IT was.

I remember being so deeply disappointed when I found out they were Christians. Here was a group of
people, and they saw so many things the way I did, and were aware of the problems in the world, and could
see them with the same sense of gravity, but somehow perhaps without the same urgency. Oh! I thought. I
just have to bring them around to the need for violent revolution! How could they not see the need for
action?!?

I got another chance to make my case later that day, when Jonathan approached me the second time. I was
more confident in the presence of my friends, and could make my case for a change. I probably didn’t make
that good an impression on poor Jonathan, but he had gained respect in my eyes.

The next day, I remember passing another bearded man, whose presence in the crowded square seemed
exceptionally small. As I passed, he asked me if I had any interest in the Bible, exactly the type of question
I had become habitually conditioned to brush off like a “head and shoulders” commercial. I suddenly
realized that this was certainly one of Jonathan’s companions, and had to follow up a curt dismissal with a
more welcoming question to this effect.

He affirmed that he was Jonathan’s friend, and so we sat down and talked. This was Michael Berens. The
way he talked was different, and I remember mostly listening and saying very little. I had such
conversations with Michael on several occasions, mostly sitting down on the benches built around the trees
in the square. He spoke softly, with little emotion. I remember finding it very odd, that, despite how little I
had said to him, he seemed to know me, or know something about how I worked inside. Although I was in
the habit of searching for rational explanations of phenomena, to resort to paranoid reasoning seemed the
obvious choice, since I had decided long ago that it was best for a revolutionary to entertain a certain
amount of paranoia. I thought it would be silly to underestimate what counter-revolutionary activities were
employed in this country.

I tossed around the hypothesis, that maybe the brothers were an elite government counter-revolutionary
unit, scouring the college towns of America to neutralize dangerous insurgents such as I enjoyed fancying
myself.

Other than paranoid suspicion, the other main impression I remember receiving from his words, was a
basic, abstract idea of what it was they were preaching. I had listened to Christians before, and almost as
long as I had been free-thinking, I was always very amused to find how poorly thought out and reasoned
were the beliefs they held with such emotionally-driven affection. I never found it challenging to find and
point out where their logic was weak, or just how they contradicted and invalidated themselves. What I was
hearing from Michael was very different; very challenging indeed.

There was also something else. It was a very uncomfortable feeling inside that I would get as he spoke, and
the picture he was painting began to come more into focus. My friend Bob asked me recently if the feeling
was “conviction”. I’ve thought a lot about that in the last week or so. I would say that that’s exactly what it
was. It was a feeling that, if what they were saying was true, then I was a bad person, a sinner, if you will.
That I would be in big trouble if I didn’t face that fact, and change.

And I couldn’t find any flaw in it. Nor could I see where my own belief system, so carefully thought out,
was wrong or illogical. I remember these inner forces of psychological conflict coming to a head more and
more as I listened to them talk.

Michael was speaking to me once when everything became clear. What I was dealing with was two
different belief systems (A is not B, nor is B A), basically irreconcilable (A plus B is not a function; i.e., A
cannot be combined with B, either in whole or in part), completely exclusive of each other (If A is true then
B cannot possibly be true; vice versa). As I beheld this conundrum, that feeling in my heart was
uncomfortable and strong. I saw what I had to do, there was no getting around it: I needed to find out which
belief system was true, and which false. At that moment all I knew for sure was that I had some major soul-
searching to do, and I couldn’t do it sitting here with this guy talking and making this feeling so
uncomfortable. I abruptly excused myself.

Later—perhaps days later—I found myself walking down a pretty road by myself. I thought, now is the
perfect time to revisit that topic of “which is true?” So help me God I tried a little bit to think about it, but
for some reason, I had the most extreme difficulty facing it. I couldn’t dwell on it; for some reason it
seemed like I could not possibly remove my own subjectivity; it was too heavy a mental load; I just
remember feeling like I stood to lose too much. Too much of my own philosophical insights, so carefully
worked and reasoned out in my mind; so much of my identity, which was bound up with those insights.
Ultimately, I would have to start over.

I viewed myself as enlightened, powerful, sophisticated. Starting over would mean losing all my dignity.
All my pride. I couldn’t reject the possibility that all of that was precisely what was necessary, but I
couldn’t do it without more proof. So I waited. I didn’t think about it really until it was time to talk to them,
but the more I did interact with them, the more quickly I was getting convicted.

It got to the point when one day, I was on the drag, under the overhang that used to be the front porch of the
building where the Scientology office was. It was afternoon, overcast, and it had been lightly drizzling on
and off all day. I liked this type of weather. Chris Ryan approached me, and started talking to me about
how futile any attempt to overthrow the government would be. He was saying that all three major
Television networks would have to be simultaneously sabotaged, (Apparently he wasn’t too aware of how
many people got their news from cable in America, which I guess, theoretically, only strengthens his
argument.) I remember thinking little more than that this guy is missing the point entirely, but the
uncomfortable feeling was there anyway. It quickly exhausted my patience.

“Look,” I cut in, desiring to get to the root of the matter sooner than later, “this is my big sin, from you
guys’ perspective: I don’t have any FAITH!”

I didn’t know if he knew what I was trying to say, but I also didn’t wait around to find out. I was getting
tired of that feeling. If they believed that they could sit back, let the world go to shit, and that God would
overthrow civilization in one fatal blow when it had gone far enough, that was just fine. I didn’t feel like I
could, because I didn’t really know for sure that there was any God or not, so how could I refuse to try to
give my life to fixing things on my own—even if it WAS futile? I thought it would be a rotten thing to find
out that sitting back had only allowed the enemy to succeed in total destruction.

I turned and walked away. I walked to the health food co-op down the street and bought a baguette, then I
walked back to the overhang. Chris was still there, but this time he was engaged with someone else, and his
younger counterpart, Don, approached me. I had just squatted down, and reached into my bag for the bread,
when he started talking to me. I remember just picking him apart in my mind. The guy was obviously a
novice, and for all his newfound enthusiasm, half of what he said seemed to be an attempt to mentally
adjust to his new beliefs.

I distinctly remember him emphatically shouting, as if this fact alone was sufficient to prove everything
else he believed, that his mother was “living in adultery—RIGHT NOW!!!”

I thought to myself that this guy obviously has “issues” with his mother, but I still listened, and tried to
open my mind. While he was talking, the rain began crashing down furiously, and he was forced to shout if
he wanted to continue his message. I called to mind the pamphlet that Jonathan or someone gave to me
called “the Days of Noah”. It was about the end of the world and the prophecy in Matthew and in Luke
17:26,27:

“And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they
drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the
flood came, and destroyed them all.”

It was basically a pamphlet comparing the world in the period immediately leading up to the flood with the
modern world, showing the exponential increase in violence and other things over the course of the last
century that should be obvious harbingers of the immanence of the end times.

I never made the connection until now, but I had a vision a month or two before this time that revisiting this
prophecy just now reminded me of. I have always seen it in connection with the conversion process I was
going through at that time in my life, but I never connected it with this prophecy before.

I was having a discussion with my friend David Taylor about the magical knowledge used by the
Egyptians. He was getting pretty excited about it, and trying to get the point across to me that if we could
tap into the magic that they used, then we could use it for basically some form or other of personal gain.
Finally, he punctuated his speech with the exclamation “That’s IT! That’s IT Doo[d]!!!”

I had an intuitive grasp of what he was trying to say, and something inside me, perhaps my first significant
disagreement with him, felt uneasy. As I focused on my reservations, I saw a clear picture in my mind, of a
man (who represented David, or someone who had taken the same attitude towards “power”) in the water at
the beach, pushing the water around with an enthusiasm that mirrored David’s. The field of vision panned
out to reveal a number of other people also in the water, pushing, splashing, moving the water, and feeling
like so many fine fellows that they were so powerful as to be capable of exerting their will and control over
the water. Then it panned out once more to reveal myself in the air above the seashore below, and I saw a
wall of water, a tsunami, towering just offshore, very near to them, waiting at the ready to utterly crush
them all. Then, the vision became instructive. It showed me to “fade” into that very wall of water. Though I
could not exert my will or any control over the tsunami, I would have found the source of true power,
become one with it, and thereby been safe. I saw all of this in an instant; it did not so much as affect the
conversation.

Anyway, for whatever reason, as Don was yelling, I looked out at the ferocity of the downpour on the
sidewalk. A lot of people had taken refuge under the overhang, and a foreboding feeling was creeping over
me. I thought, what if the world was ending right now? What if everything had been leading up to this very
moment, and this was the end, at least for me? It was a scary thought.

Michael Berens had sometimes given me the feeling that he knew me, or that he knew things about me, that
were strangely accurate for my relative quietness towards him. Don in all his novice zeal quoted Bible
verses that did the same thing, but in a much more pointed and blatant way. The thing is, I really don’t
think I had as yet said anything to Don whatsoever. Ever. My hand was still clutching the bread I had
bought earlier, and I was still frozen in the same basic position I was when his tirade had begun, crouched
over my bag to pull out my meal.

I don’t remember every Bible verse, but I do remember the last one. It reads like this:

“That we [henceforth] be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of
doctrine, by the sleight of men, [and] cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;” (Eph 4:14)

The degree of personal significance bound up in hearing that verse in that moment is hard to communicate
effectively. Years before this incident, as I was embracing more and more of revolutionary Marxism,
following the Marxist “Historical Materialism” line, (and personalizing it a little bit, as was my manner). I
labeled my self an agnostic, rejecting conclusions drawn from or about the unseen and the un-quantifiable
supernatural realm.

Then, as time went by, I had a supernatural experience. I had a “crush” on a girl at the time who practiced
some sort of magic, and I saw something that caused me to open my mind about the spirit world. It was no
earth shattering miracle, but it forced me to reconsider my materialist rejection of things that were beyond
the realm of matter and energy. One thing led to another.

Not long after that, I was hitch-hiking from Dallas to Austin, and someone picked me up, he said, because I
had a “violet aura”. I asked what that meant, and he told me that it was “the highest level”, like a “shaman”
or something. When someone else told me the same things, that I had a violet aura and what it meant, I was
totally “in”. All the evidence I needed was that it fit with and reinforced my rather exalted self-image. I
didn’t walk around telling people about auras, but I kept it as a little flattering thought at the back of my
mind.

Then when I got to Austin, it really hit the fan. Someone would tell me about this, and about that, and my
belief system would just make little adjustments to fit everything in. I ended up spending spare time
“charging” crystals, by holding them between my thumb and forefinger. I looked at all this mental
adaptability in a rather positive light, as I looked approvingly on most things I did. I thought of it as a
continuing enlightenment; that I was growing.

When Don said the verse above, it revealed it all for me. My view of the world had become more like a ball
on the water, going from one thing to the next, depending only on which way the “wind” was blowing. This
was an entirely different way of seeing my little path of “enlightenment”, and revealed it to me as
something most shameful and immature.

I couldn’t say for sure, but one of the verses Don must have quoted had to be Jer 17:9 (The heart [is]
deceitful above all [things], and desperately wicked: who can know it?), because the most decisive thing I
came to see during his speech was a revealing view of that which had been my trusted guide up to that
point.

I had been taught once, when I still believed in God as a young man, that the conscience is the “direct
revelation of God” to individuals. The ability to distinguish right and wrong was within the power of being
honest with ones self about if something was right or wrong, based on conscience, or what my “heart” told
me. In effect, trusting my heart was the foundation of my entire worldview and philosophy. I thought it was
inerrant, good, just. I thought only when people willingly cross their own sense of right and wrong do they
actually do evil, and hence become evil.

There was something that I saw that night clearly that “wrecked my world”. I SAW my heart as it truly
was. It was right there in front of me, in a vision, laid out for me to see just what it was I had been
following. It was black. It was hideous. It was shameful.
When Don uttered the Bible verses, each time there followed a huge clap of thunder. Precisely at the
moment Don said the verse, thunder struck. It was as if the powerful storm up above was made subject to
the words he was uttering. I don’t know how many times in a row this happened; certainly more than three,
perhaps as many as seven times. It’s been so long I can’t remember.

He’d say a verse, which was powerfully convicting in and of itself. Then thunder would strike immediately.

When Don ran out of steam, so did the storm. Chris said to him something like “come on, brother, we gotta
go” and they were off. Three bearded men had been standing together, and they all left. Then one of them
turned back and said “you don’t have to believe that. You can believe whatever you wanna believe.”

I was shocked—first of all, I thought he was one of those guys. Three bearded men with rain ponchos on,
but this guy actually turned out to be a home-bum. Secondly, I was dumbfounded that he could have
witnessed what just happened and then said something to the contrary. It’s hard for me to know exactly
how other people’s perception of the event differed from my own, but the fact that Don was punctuating his
speech with Bible verses that were in turn punctuated by Lightning and thunder was so obvious that I
would not have believed it wasn’t obvious to everyone within earshot.

Actually, the overhang had become quite crowded with people, and a lot of them had been staring at us.
When the rain stopped, I was in a degree of shock that they all just left without regarding it. I was shocked
that he brothers left, the general reaction to the whole incident was incredible to me. I felt like it was a little
bit of proof that people just ignored God, being more focused on where they had to go next to care about
what I felt like was an obvious confirmation of God’s being real. Something that doesn’t happen everyday,
to say the least.

For an hour or so, I would describe my state of mind as shock. Something really profound and very real had
just happened. There was no way to process it, it just was. I couldn’t believe the way others around had
responded to it.

Gradually, the street got quieter. I was still under the overhang, but almost everyone else had found
someplace else to go. It was late, and it was typical for the drag to kind of settle down in this way.

As I was left with my thoughts, I started to wonder if there could possibly be any rational explanation for
what had just happened. I began toying with my earlier paranoid theories that I had entertained about the
brothers before—that this all could have been some sort of elaborate ploy on the part of the government. I
began picking at the pieces of what had happened, and trying to somehow coordinate a theory, what
“maybe” could have happened.

I reasoned, that an airplane could have possibly “seeded” the clouds with dust—I had heard of that on TV a
long time ago. That seemed possible. Not likely, but if one was willing to go out on a limb…This airplane,
perhaps, could have had a large antenna, which produced high voltage electricity, and a way for the guys on
the ground to signal. Hmmm…

Suffice it to say, that it was a hypothesis that could have only been seriously introduced by a lunatic—or
someone desperate. As I was thinking on these things, and working them out in my mind, I felt a bodily
presence begin to leave me. All my thoughts were going with it, and all that was left was lunacy. It felt like
the psychotic effects of LSD, a state of mind where thoughts were not possible, and stress reigned.

I could see where such thoughts were leading me, and decided right away that I did not want such
consequences. I started mentally back-pedaling. I saw that rationalizing that experience away wasn’t a safe
option. I still wasn’t capable of fully processing it, I couldn’t yet think of what all it meant for me and for
my life, but what had happened had happened, and for the time, I could just leave it at that.

Once I had quieted my mind, then things started happening around me. A home-bum that I knew a little bit
came around the corner, squatted back with one arm supporting himself from behind and pointed at the
front doors of the Scientology office directly in front of him, and at the top of his lungs, yelled “JESUS
CHRIST DID NOT DIE FOR YOUR SINS!!!”

Anyway, the next couple of days were strange. The noises of the city were louder. They would get to me
more. I felt naked. Everything I had believed in was gone, and I just felt like God was there, and he could
see everything about me. It was uncomfortable. Instinctively, I wanted to run somewhere far away, and
hide, but when I thought about this impulse, I knew that it was pointless, that I couldn’t have hidden
anywhere. There was one reassuring thought—only one. I remembered from the past hearing Christians
talk about how God was merciful.

I finally ran into some brothers again, and I asked them for a New Testament. They asked if I wanted to
talk, and I said that I did. We went across the street to the UT campus, and sat down in some grass. The
brothers were K’tan, Jason, and Michael Avery. Michael was thirteen at the time, and he had been there the
first day, when I talked to Jonathan the second time.

I told them that I was having difficulty with a particular problem. I thought that I was supposed to have
believed what the brothers were preaching via faith, but now I had irrefutable proof that it was true. Was it
too late for me to be saved now that faith had a substantially diminished role in my conversion?

K’tan explained to me that Thomas had held out for proof, and that Yeshua said that things to the effect that
it wasn’t too late for him. My only nagging doubt was therefore alleviated. He kept talking on and on, but I
had stopped listening to him. He told Michael to stop playing with the grass, that it could be distracting. I
was only observing Michael and Jason, and how full of peace they were, and how content. I thought it
stupid for K’tan to have corrected him, an not appreciated how beautiful it was.

As I was sitting there, I had a thought that was like a light-bulb moment for me. Literally, I thought “Oh! I
have to get to heaven—no matter what!” No matter, what I had to do, no matter what it cost, what I had to
suffer or lose, and as I thought that, something entered my body.

It came down from the top of my head, and went down through me, like liquid, filling me up. When it got
down to my heart, my heart felt hot. It filled my mind, too.

It felt really good. It made me want to DO good. It WAS good. It made me believe that I had a chance to
get to heaven, and the faith that it gave me filled me up with a particular emotion. It was an intimately
familiar emotion, one that wasn’t new, or strange, or foreign. However, it had been so long since I had
experienced that particular emotion, that I had somehow forgotten altogether that it even existed. It was
Joy.

Also, I was full of peace. Peace and contentment; I couldn’t have wanted anything in the world, and
nothing you could have traded me in all the world would have made me feel like that. This was the Holy
Ghost.

It occurred to me, that this was the reason so many of the brothers had had that mysterious glow about
them. I never put my finger on it before, but I couldn’t understand how it could be happening to me. The
first words out of my mouth were “But—I’m not Holy!” I couldn’t have been happier, or more
undeserving.

I don’t feel condemned for not being a part of that group anymore, and I don’t think I ever have. But the
fact that such a thing happened to me through that group leads me to seriously question people who say
they are all bad.

I don’t think they’re all good. I think they are dead wrong about a few things. But they aren’t all bad, either.

Peace.