Welcome Godfrey!

    Hello! I come to Epicurus by way of Zen and the Stoics.... I've got no formal education in philosophy. As a way to learn to meditate, I attended a Zen sitting group for several years. Eventually I began hunting for a Western philosophy and came across the Stoics. The more I looked in to Stoicism, the more dissatisfied I was with it: it has a complete system, but most practitioners seem to pitch Physics and Logic and reduce the system to nothing but Ethics and some practices. I discovered Epicurus while reading Cicero's On The Nature of the Gods. Finally, here is something that makes sense to a Westerner and is a complete philosophy (well, what remains of the writings at least). It really resonates with me; I've been dabbling, reading, trying it out in my life for a year or so.

    This forum is the best thing that I've found in terms of an Epicurean community (I don't do Facebook...). Lots of great info, and it seems to be fairly active and growing. After checking in periodically for a few months, I decided to take the dive and join in! I've been working on a tentative outline and hopefully I'll get it posted before too long.

    Cassius and Hiram, thanks for all you've been doing to spread the word!

    Thank you Godfrey! Glad to have you hear and we look forward to working with you. Your story about dissatisfaction with stoicism is a common one! Please feel free to start threads in any section by posting your thoughts or asking questions. That's what is going to help us build critical mass here - just dig in whereever is of interest and even if someone doesn't respond immediately, over time we'll have a resource that people can come back to and learn from, and meet people and have a good time along the way. Look forward to working with you!

    Godfrey, you mentioned that you are not a Facebook person -- do you mind my asking how you found this forum? We need to "get out the word" as best as possible, so I am interested to know if your way of finding us can be leveraged and expanded. Thanks!

    As I recall I found the Society of Friends of Epicurus on Google+, and found this forum from the links on that site. It would be ideal if both this site and Hiram's site came up at or near the top of a Google search. Both sites deserve to be there due to the wealth of information that you both provide. I don't know what it takes to get there however, maybe it takes more resources than are reasonable and/or available.