For my first trick...

This is the part where I tell anyone who's reading about myself.

- Star Wars fan

- Philosophy geek

- Pantheist

- No formal college education.  No plan of study or research.  This is specifically for fun, and to satisfy my own crazy desire to understand the history of ideas, on my own terms.

When I was eight years old, sitting in a restaurant with my grandmother, I said, "I think God is nature."  After I cleared the brimstone smoke out of my ears, I shut up about it for a very long time.

I never forgot that day, and that simple belief stuck with me.  After I eventually left the church, I rediscovered my inner pantheist, and have been exploring the history of pantheism ever since.

Step one:  Discover a guy named Benedict Spinoza.

Step two:  Acquire Spinoza's Ethics from Half-Price Books.

Step three:  Realize what deep shit I've gotten myself into.

So lately I've been living on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, reading Early Greek Philosophy, and falling in love with people like Empedocles and Plotinus.  I'm starting to see links between the thought of the Greeks and Spinoza's theories, and my mind is spinning away.

This blog will be a record of my explorations, discoveries, and random ramblings.  There will probably be no particular order to my thoughts, except as they relate to my central interest in Spinoza.