Islam should be banned in the United States on the basis of being a death cult, not a religion.

You misunderstood the point of my argument about an attack on Islam being an attack on Muslims as individuals. Obviously Muslims have attacked other Muslims, like Christians have attacked other Christians, but this fact is irrelevant in the context of that point. I was trying to show that it is silly to think about tangible attacks on an abstract entity like Islam - the people hurt or affected, no matter who perpetrates the violence, Muslims or non-Muslims, are Muslims themselves. Your whole response here corresponds to a strawmen argument: a position invented by your imagination for the sake of disputation. Next you acknowledge that you are claiming that Muslims behave as if they are in a death cult. Well, that means you are attacking the sanity of Muslim people, along with their fundamental character and morality, among other things. Your statements here perpetuate the intellectual summersaults that run rampant in your arguments. In your second post, you clearly stated, "I am not arguing anything about individual Muslims," but that's exactly what you're doing! You're arguing against Muslim individuals by describing the ethos of their lives with vitriolic and defamatory rhetoric. Either your positions are highly inconsistent or, as I suspect is more likely, you are unable to clearly express them, a fact that causes problems both for you and for me, your fellow debater tirelessly yearning to understand and decipher your addled remarks. If we are doing strict body counts - that is, for how many deaths do Muslims and Christians shoulder responsibility - and ignoring innumerable problems involving context, motivation, and identification, than Christianity has obviously been more violent. But this is all a silly game; Christianity has been more violent because the sociopolitical institutions supporting its growth have been more focused and well-organized, facilitating superior abilities to inflict pain and suffering. It hasn't been more violent because its message is more violent; I'm not saying that Islam is a better religion than Christianity, just for the record. They both have serious flaws and some mild benefits. The assertion that Christianity civilized the world is almost patently phantasmagoric. The world was plenty civilized before the arrival of Christianity. In fact, the root word for the English 'civilization' is the Latin 'civis,' which means 'city.' This bit of etymology means to show that civilizations fundamentally consist of cities and urban agglomerations, which were not given to humanity by Christians. Your fiction about violence committed in the name of Christ also applies to violence committed in the name of Islam. All of these religions fundamentally preach love, peace, and tolerance, the same ideas they often ignore in practice. Your speculation on the number of Muslim terrorists and jihadists reveals nothing useful because it lacks accuracy. The figures themselves are completely bogus; the actual number of jihadists amounts to something like a few thousand, and the potential for growth in the short-term is not notable. And what's more, using a discredited site with an overtly biased and irrational agenda does not speak well for your investigative capacities. I already explained some of the non-religious factors driving terrorism when I mentioned history in my last post. The West has had a complicated relationship with the Muslim world in the twentieth century, in many ways a continuation of previous journeys. American meddling in Iranian affairs, for example, caused the outrage and the revolution that led to the hostage crisis, a crisis that severely damaged the relationship between the two countries....and that inspired several terrorist acts later on. Keep in mind that I do not completely absolve Islam of blame; I am just saying that religion is one piece of a larger jigsaw puzzle. It does not make sense to blame Islam entirely for problems that have deeper roots. Due to this fact, and others highlighted above, I conclude that Islam and Muslims should not be banned from the United States because banning them would not resolve the challenges we face.