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Eris first appeared to me in the form of Brigitte Nielsen in the film Red Sonja.  I can trace my entire journey to Erisian thought to seeing that film in a theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico one hot summer in 1985.  I was ten years old.

Two weeks after seeing the film I was in a game store to purchase a chess board.  The store, a fairly upscale and grown-up place (not a toy store), had a display of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.  The game seemed to hold the promise of the film, so I begged my dad to buy it.  He did.

Four years later I joined a gaming group in Seattle.  One day a player was running late, and the DM pulled out his copy of Steve Jackson Games Illuminati.  We drew Societies at random, and I got the Discordians.  I thought they were stupid, but I really liked the game.

One day I happened to be in a game store looking for a new game, and I saw the Steve Jackson edition of the Principia Discordia.  I flipped through it, didn't get it at all (is this related to a game?), but was so curious I ended up buying it.

It was pretty much all downhill from there.

I went with the Buddhist/Taoist option, primarily because I see Erisian thought as an Americanized melange of Eastern philosophy underlined by a presumption of a Christian context for the adherent.

The original Discordian thought obviously draws strongly from the Orientalism of sixties radicalism, the partially understood Taoism and Buddhism popularized by Alan Watts, but it is also an quintessentially American artifact.  A proper Taoist text would have no need to undermine and attack Christian assumptions of spirituality, but the Principia does just this, and necessarily so -- the near total domination of Christianity in the West means even the atheist's thought is influenced by Christian assumptions.  The humor and anti-professionalism of the Principia also challenges these assumptions -- the "nobility" of spiritual teachers in this case -- in a way the slick and propagandistic packaging of Buddhism and other Eastern thought categorically does not.  No one confuses Greg Hill with Discordianism, not the way Westerners conflate the hero-worship of the Dalai Lama with Buddhism in the exact same way Catholics conflate the hero-worship of the Pope with Christian piety.

As a Westerner raised in a Christian dominated culture by formerly-Catholic atheists, I've long held that it would be disingenuous of me to pretend to be an adherent of an Eastern spiritual philosophy when I really have no understanding of the role of those beliefs in the context of life as lived by its adherents.  Hence I am a Discordian, as I can understand Discordianism -- it is accessible in a way the Tao te Ching never will be.

Also I'm new.  Please don't kill me.