I'm searching for philosophical forums where I can perhaps start to study things more systematically. As well as this one, http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/ and http://www.philosophyforum.com/ look promising, and there are a couple of others to look at as well, although I haven't yet approached any except Minds Eye.
At http://www.philosophyforum.com/, in particular, there is a forum for New Member Introductions. I am vaguely thinking of posting something like what follows below. It's a very rough first draft, so please be charitable even while being critical! I believe in a God who is immanent in each of us, universally loving, and an absolute moral authority. I have no knowledge or opinion as to whether this God created the universe, or is omnipotent. I don't think I have ever believed in any supernatural events, not since I was a child and believed in Santa Claus. I think I have always, since then, been inclined to believe that no supernatural events occur or ever have occurred, although, as with creation and omnipotence, I don't claim total certainty about this. I do believe in paranormal phenomena, and I think that Jung's concept of synchronicity provides ample room for such phenomena to occur, within what is called coincidence. Philosophically, I believe that human beings are minds, not bodies, and although of course human minds /have/ human bodies, I think that it is not only a gross error, but causes incalculable harm, to imagine that any amount of knowledge of human bodies will ever give human minds even the smallest knowledge of other human minds or of themselves. This belief is independent of my belief in paranormal phenomena (which is an intellectual embarrassment). I haven't studied philosophy formally, but I think I would like to learn something about about Plato, Meister Eckhart, Locke, Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Emerson, Bergson, William James, Mill, Freud, Jung, Merleau-Ponty, Gabriel Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, Popper, Feyerabend, and Chomsky. I'm pretty much open to suggestions, although I'm chronically and quite deeply depressed and it's quite a struggle for me to get through any books at all. What little education I have is in pure mathematics, although even that is incomplete. I have also done a fair amount of unsystematic reading, over the years, on the subject of mental illness (so called) and psychotherapy. In a word, I suppose I'm a mystic: a budding one, an extremely undeveloped and confused one, lost in a world that has seemed dark, strange, and threatening for a very long time.
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