While I sympathize with your plight, you must keep in mind that Facebook is still, after all, a private company. And when a private company looks at a person they see a customer. And when they look at a customer, they see revenue vs cost. If it is too costly to interact with everyone in your situation vs the new revenue you will bring, they will simply write those people off as losses and tie off the bleeding asap.

The most notorious example of this is when insurance companies deny coverage to high risk people because they are likely to cost the company more in payouts than they bring in new revenue. In fact, that's why there is now a law to address the problem.

Facebook is not a public institution. It is not a government agency. It's not even a non-profit or NGO. It's a private company out to make a buck based on pure volume. Don't expect much sympathy or individual attention.

Want to effect change? Use another site. That's what everyone at myspace did.

I am impressed that you are aware of specific scriptures, but I believe you are misinterpreting that particular edict. In the context of satan's temptation, "test" is understood to mean "take advantage of" or to test how far god is willing to go to protect his son. This does not mean test god in the way the scientific method is defined. But this misses the point anyway.

First of all, only people who cannot see past the literal text of the bible are held back by such commandments. And moreover, what if you're not a Christian? The idea that I am not allowed to make any philosophical inquiries because Jesus scolded satan seems a bit of a stretch.

If by "results" you are referring to the transcendent experience of spiritual enlightenment, I would suggest that the whole point of any religion is to make such an experience consistently repeatable. Do this and that and you will achieve enlightenment. This is what religions do.

If you instead mean the existence of god, I agree that it is not a testable fact. God is by definition beyond understanding because the very concept is defined as both everything and beyond everything.

My point here is that the process of spiritual enlightenment is most definitely a testable fact, even if that fact is not something you can demonstrate to anyone else who has not achieved it themselves. It's like doing an experiment whose outcome is experienced only by the experimenter. You don't make a thing, you remake yourself.

Huh? Who's telling you to do anything? What tricks are you talking about? If you want to know how to reproduce the "experiment", there are thousands upon thousands of books on the religious experience and how it was (allegedly) achieved by many different types of people. The only common requirement is some degree of faith. In fact, many would say that spiritual enlightenment is the logical extension of faith. That having faith in something more powerful than yourself is the road to the experience I am referring to. To get some inkling of what I mean, consider the feeling you get when you contemplate the size of the universe or the galaxy we live in or the star we orbit around. That sense of awe is palpable and can lead to some profound revelations about yourself and the world. Now imagine what it would be like to contemplate a concept like God and you're on your way.

And by the way, none of this requires you to give up any control over what you do or say or think. If god does exist, you are living in his world right now. Do you feel controlled or manipulated? Why would further understanding take that away from you?

What? Self-esteem? What are you talking about? Yourself?

So you have faith in the claims of the people you trust and take their word as gospel? Sounds familiar. I am not in any way suggesting that the current assertions about gravity are untrue, but as an individual you cannot hope to utilize the scientific method for every assertion made by everyone in the scientific community. It is not a practical possibility. We must have faith that these things are true and test them as necessary. Similarly you can have faith in certain aspects of a particular religion and test them as necessary. For example, I can have faith in the "golden rule" and decide that it's incorrect only after I actually give it a shot in earnest. There is of course no way to test the existence of a god figure, but there's also no way to test string theory or what's inside a black hole. Does that invalidate the scientific method?

Conversely, have you ever actually tried to live the way Siddhartha suggested and decided he was full of shit? Have you ever tried to follow the teachings of a particular religion in earnest or are you just assuming them to be wrong on principle? Had it occurred to you that what some call divine whim, others call "rules" that the universe enforces based on our makeup in much the same way as we are subject to the rules of gravity and quantum mechanics? Had it ever occurred to you that religious teachings might actually be a series of symbolic parables for actual physical properties of the universe? E.g., "Let there be light" == "Big Bang"?

Completely untrue. Just about every religion worth talking about has a similar paradigm: founding individual makes assertions based on observation, conveys those assertions to followers, followers make their own observations and adjust their practices based on those observations. Granted, religions tend to be far more static than scientific theories because the founder tends to be the ultimate authority and is usually dead, but that is not always true. Consider that Jesus was a Jew who said that his predecessor's assumptions were incomplete/untrue. Consider that Mohammed claimed to be another in a line of prophets who was given a new "truth". Consider that (according to tradition) the current incarnation of the Buddha is here to, among other things, interpret Siddhartha's teachings for the modern world.

The point here is that there is grand tradition of modification and adaptation in just about every major religion and those adaptations are based on experience and observation. Sound familiar?

And BTW, your "horseshit" comment is not only inappropriate, but reveals a level of personal immaturity that most likely precludes you from truly understanding the problem at hand. Please don't act like a child if you intend to sit at the adult's table.

So you're talking about the laws of physics then? Stepping off a cliff is a bad idea because of that "arbitrary" gravity rule. Touching a flame is a bad idea because of the whole heat energy thing. Walking out onto a highway is a bad idea because of the weight-ratio/inertia problem.

Of course you can make the argument that gravity and the like are testable and "real", but how realistic is that?

I must have faith that nuclear reactors actually work because I have never actually seen one in operation with my own eyes. I must rely on the experiences and reporting of others. I can of course go to a nuclear reactor and try to experience it for myself, but if I am sufficiently doubtful even that would not be enough. I would have to actually experiment with nuclear material and completely control ever aspect of the environment to ensure that no one is tampering with the experiment. Otherwise I can never unequivocally prove to myself that it is fact and not fiction.

Similarly, if you apply a that process to the (broadest) claims of any given religion, you will end up with a similar result. New doubts require more "proof" in order to maintain the belief. Hence the now cliche "give me a sign" lament from someone who is overcome by doubt about something they previously had enough faith to believe.

We were raised in an era where the de-facto attitude toward religion is that it is a means of control and that it should be met with skepticism at all turns - which is wise given it's mixed history. But you will find that by applying the same attitude toward scientific wisdom (if not the scientific method itself), all the same flaws arise with all the same answers from the "high priests": have faith young scientist, the "method" will relieve you of all your doubts if you allow it to...

Why do you associate faith with lunacy? Perhaps you should look at the faith we all share in science as an explanation for everything. As far as I am aware, there is no definitive proof that there is a finite set of deterministic rules that govern all phenomena. We simply have faith that the scientific method is universal and that, given enough time, we have all the tools we need to figure out absolutely everything.

Does that make every scientist a lunatic?

BTW, I don't think ID as generally presented has any merit as science or even theology, but I am not yet willing to rule out the concept on all levels. Given the rapidly increasing size and complexity of the models we use to conceptualize the "universe" we see - that term is now used as an atomically, with the potential for an infinite number of them out there - it seems odd to claim that our sense of how things work is even close to being "universal". We most likely know next to nothing about how things actually work, and are just beginning to open our eyes to what's really going on. And what happens when we find out there are things out there we can't "see"? E.g., dark matter, dark energy, alternate universes, cyclical big bangs, cells using quantum teleportation etc., etc., etc. These things might be indirectly observable and perhaps testable, but the fact that we didn't even have a concept to describe them until a few decades ago should temper one's faith in the scientific method as a universal tool. After all, it would seem that there is far more going on than meets the eye.

Uh... Japan? Germany? Iraq?

(yes i know iraq is by no means stable yet, but they are in fact a democracy, and there is no reason to believe it will fall apart any time soon)

Rape has to do with consent, not necessarily violence. Violence is obviously used to overcome the lack of consent, but you do not need to violently rape someone. Statutory rape is when you have sex with someone who is not old enough to offer consent in the first place. Someone who is sleeping is incapable of consent (unless there's some kind of pre-arranged consent video or something - I'm sure its a well known fetish).

And in this case we're talking about a fine line. One of the women claims that she consented to protected sex, but when Assange insisted on removing the condom, she retracted her consent but he refused to recognize that (allegedly). That's still rape. She did not consent to what he was doing and he did it anyway. I understand that such a finely tuned definition is not the norm, but we praise places like Sweden for their progressive policies on speech and the law, so why are they suddenly called a bunch of left-wing extremists when someone like Assange is involved?

Hypocrisy, plain and simple.

And BTW, Assange's claim that he 'fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism' should tell people all they need to know about his dedication to human rights and fighting the "good fight". He's a narcissistic ego-manic.

Wikileaks=important, Assange=asshole.

You're kidding right?

That's the attitude that really pisses off content creators/owners. Why do you think people make money from pirated material? By not paying to purchase the source material, they can sell it at 100% profit. And similarly, a site like piratebay or torrentreactor receives revenue from advertising, but don't pay licensing fees for the content that they help distribute and that brings people to their "shop".

Spare me the plausible deniability bullshit too. The nature of the torrent technology is such that you can technically distribute content without a search engine, but search engines allow the rapid dissemination of links, without which 99.9% of torrents would never see the light of day. There is no such thing as a torrent ecosystem without search engines in the same way that there's no "black-market" without someone who knows where it is and takes you there - making them an accomplice.

And btw, if they want to sell t-shirts to make money for their defense or party of whatever, they can do so without associating it with the site that was shut down. If they can't - or won't - then that's their own problem.

I know you think that makes sense, but I have no idea what you're talking about.

Mastercard is simply attempting to cut off businesses that engage in illegal activities. What does that have to do with legit services? He can still buy stuff from newegg and donate to /. What service can't he use other than pirate sites?

Riiight... And people who used limewire and the pirate bay were looking for redhat releases.

And besides that, if the biz that sells legit and non-legit stuff can't figure out a way to separate the two in their books, they are probably not a legit biz in the first place.

no actually i don't. What does the right to privacy have to do with a bank no longer processing transactions for businesses that sell pirated material?

Are you referring to possible abuses? Sounds like "death panels" and regulation==communism extremism bullshit to me.

So you buy a lot of pirated content then do ya? Perhaps you should consider the fact that you are stealing people's work before you take such a righteous tone.