This page presents a summary of stuff about me that might be of interest to anyone who cared, organized by topic. Enjoy!
I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand in junior high school at the instigation of my parents. It was fairly definitive in shaping my explicit philosophy, giving coherence to the values and beleifs I'd been raised with. I spent a fair amount of high school immersed in Objectivism and arguing it with the people around me, most of whom treated it dismissively. I became a bit critical of it during college but still mostly accepted the tenets of the philosophy until my mid-twenties, when I began to find flaws in its treatment of free-will and in the behavior and attitudes of the philosophy's major proponents. I considered myself a "small o" objectivist up until the age of 30, when reading several books by Stephen Pinker on evolutionary psychology caused me to re-evaluate some of the core tenets and decide that the primary axioms of the system were flawed. Of late, I've been working on hashing out the details of my own perspective with an eye towards formalizing it at some point into a written work.
Throughout the course of my educational career, I have been exposed to a great variety of other philosophical perspectives and have been generally unimpressed with them. I hold with the traditional school that believes that truth does exist and can be ascertained through observation and reason, whereas most of modern philosophy abandons the existance of truth in favor of meaningless subjectivism or revelationist absolutism. I've found value in Nietzsche (who has more influence on Rand than she ever wanted to admit) and Aristotle, but I'm ultimately a hard-core realist. I don't believe in the spirit, the soul, or the divine. I'm an atheist and a materialist who believes in universe that functions on causality and is strictly deterministic. I believe in free will, insofar as we are self-deterministic, but believe we are bound to our natures, malleable and complex as they are.
My political bent, so long as I've had one, has been libertarian. I have always been rather radically liberal in social issues and have tended conservative in economic ones. Since the age of 30, I have been reconsidering some of my views on government spending and economic controls and so have probably been leaning a little more liberal. I am a big believer in small, limited government and don't believe it is the government's job to enforce morality (ethics, yes, but that's a different issue). As an atheist, the separation of church and state is very important to me, which is a large part of why I can't stomach Republicans these days. My view of foreign policy is generally one of non-involvement. I don't believe in interventionism abroad or the half-assed imperialism of selectively supporting and helping to overthrow regimes according to our (generally very short-term) interest. I do have a soft spot for things we do to support human rights and aid countries in trouble, but am fairly cynical about means and motives such that I usually disapprove of such efforts (Iraq as a case in point).
I was raised nominally Roman Catholic. Up until the age of about seven or eight, I prayed and believed in God, and then one day decided that the concept of God was ridiculous and have been an atheist ever since. I have never reconsidered, nor have I ever seen anything to make me think for a moment that there was a God. I was pressured into completing Confirmation, as a nod to my maternal grandmother, but otherwise have spurned religion my entire life. Moreover, I have found religious thinking and religious individuals to be a source of endless frustration, irritation, and annoyance. Mostly because I have a low tolerance for dogmatism, bigotry, and irrationality. I have met my share of reasonable and well-intentioned theists, but I still think they are wrong. I've always had trouble not baiting them or being derisive of their beliefs, having aquired a tendency to flame and rant on Usenet back in the good old days.
I think that religion is a quirk in our design. We are creatures possessing of a great capacity for pattern-recognition and a drive to explain the world around us and this can lead to superstitious or magical thinking. We learn by analogy and so our first attempt to explain what we don't understand is to try and come up with a reference to ourselves. So, when we don't know where the world comes from or the way it works, we make up gods, more powerful and wise versions of ourselves whose actions give reason to the universe. It's a simple mistake, but after thousands of years of mental evolution I feel like it is really time for us to get over it and leave it behind like we have alchemy, magic, numerology, animism, astrology, and the scores of other bad theories we've entertained as a race. Sadly, most of those are still sticking around and gaining in popularity. Evolution is just too damn slow.
I started role-playing when I got the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set in the red box when it first came out in 1983. I don't recall how I ended up getting it, but it was a life-changing thing and has shaped how I have fun and channel by creative energies for my entire adult life. Over the course of the 80s, I played mostly TSR games: Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In high school, I picked up the various Iron Crown games (MERP, SpaceMaster, Cyberspace, RoleMaster). In the 90s, I played GURPS (and its precursor, the Fantasy Trip), Stormbringer, Kult, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, and finally the World of Darkness. Lately, I've picked up Unknown Armies, Nobilis, and Deliria and have gotten back into Dungeons & Dragons and GURPS with their new editions. Most of my friends have been role-playing gamers and I met my wife through an online game (a MUSH called DarkWeb, set in White Wolf's World of Darkness). It is my primary hobby, source of entertainment, and medium for socializing.
I'd probably be best described as a secular humanist in that I believe there are principles of behavior and government that apply to all humanity and that regional, cultural, and religious perspectives should be tolerated where they don't interfere with these central rights and principles. Generally, freedom and the open exchange of ideas should be the cornerstone of any good government system. Laws should be about protecting citizens from deception and coercion through force or threat of force. Compassion should be balanced with a sense of justice, truth should always trump deception, emotional considerations need to be recognized but decisions need to be based on rationality, and you should never attempt to legislate good taste.
I've just recently started to gain an interest in an offshoot of Secular Humanism called Transhumanism, which believes that humanity needs to have an active hand in their own development, physically and psychologically as well as socially and politically. Natural selection has ceased to have a firm grip on our development, not only is it too slow to respond to the rate of change of human civilization but it was always a slow and inexact hand at that. We need to use the tools at our disposal in order to improve ourselves, fixing those things which are broken and improving those parts of us which are insufficient. We can't struggle by with the mind and body of a hunter-gatherer anymore. Our survival requires that we perform the functions which nature has prior.