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

Thank you for your response, solarman. Let me clarify the foundations of the debate. Your arguments in the last post are obfuscating and contradictory. You claim that you are only interested in Islam as a religion yet you utter some fairly despicable words against Muslims as individuals. I urge you to read your own comments more carefully. What are we to make of the following statements? - "By and large, most [Muslims] could hardly care less about the thousands of people who lose their lives in the name of this religion each year." - "And finally, we came to realize that this extraordinary arrogance and self-absorption on the part of the Muslim community, along with an inability to empathize with others or engage in the sort of self-critique that leads to moral progress is in no way incidental to the religion." These are direct attacks on the moral character of Muslims worldwide, all one billion of them. In fact, any attempt to separate Islam as a concept from Muslims as individuals would be totally futile. Religions are reified as concrete entities, but in reality they consist of actual people, as do other frequently reified abstract ideas like societies or nations. It is not Islam that 'acts' or Islam that 'does.' Muslims are the actors and the doers, meaning that an attack on Islam is necessarily an attack on Muslims themselves, either physical - as in the bombing of a mosque that offends or kills Muslims - or symbolic and intellectual - as in an argument that lambasts the Islamic religion and its creators and supporters. The whole point here, and the foundation for my perspective in the debate, is that when you say you are attacking Islam, you are actually attacking Muslims since Islam does not exist as a real thing (only Muslims and their associated creations, which we call 'Islam,' do). As much as you deny it then, you are, in fact, blabbering quite a lot about individual Muslims. This effectively means that, in calling the religion a "death cult," you are also claiming that its members behave like they are in a death cult. What else could you mean, right? And you say such things about Muslim comportment in your post. From that angle, one could understand why you would want to deport Muslims from the United States. The next step in the debate must now be to show that Muslims do not constitute a death cult, which would invalidate your premise and, ultimately, your conclusion that Muslims should be banned from the country. Your invectives generally smack of bombastic paranoia and ignorance about the complexities of the Islamic religion - or, for that matter, of any religion. Most of the supposed problems that you identify with Islam are not unique to it at all. Cognate accusations can be leveled at other religions, like Christianity or Judaism. Just consider the following Biblical verses: - "..the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shall smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them." Deuteronomy 7:1-2, on the Israeli invasion of Canaan and the destruction of the people living there. - "If thou shalt hear say in one of the cities...certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known...[tells them to inquire into veracity of claims]...thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword." Deuteronomy 13:12-15, an instruction telling the Israelites to destroy any cities that worshipped false idols. Quotations with similar themes are found in the New Testament as well. Religious intolerance is not peculiar to Muslims; it is something almost inherent in all genuine votaries. In fact, Christianity has probably been the most intolerant religion in human history. The mass violence committed in the name of Islam pales to that committed in the name of Christianity. The primary mistake that you are making here, however, is in equating the entire religion - its people and their tenets, rituals, and practices - with the absurd actions of a few extremists (terrorists). The vast majorities of Muslims are not terrorists and do not support terrorist actions. Several major Muslim leaders throughout the world have also denounced the crimes and concomitant ideologies of people like Osama bin Laden. That aside, I notice that we have not yet gotten to the crux of the debate: blaming only religion for actions and situations that have multifarious sources, sometimes including or excluding religion itself. Eschewing the problem of "one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter," terrorist actions are not solely inspired by religion. Just for everyone's knowledge, there are also plenty of Christian terrorist groups, so it's not like terrorism is confined to Muslims. Much of the problems that we are discussing are largely political in nature, not religious. Blaming religion, and in this case Islam, definitely serves as a political expedient for some people who have an axe to grind. To fully understand the causes of modern Islamic terrorism, we have to understand modern Islamic history and how it has been shaped through contacts with Western powers. I will in no way give a comprehensive description of that history, mainly because there is not enough space or time, but the relevant point is that Muslims feel like Western powers have besieged their societies for decades, both with soft and hard power tactics and strategies. A sense of alienation grips them, or some of them, and this then incites violence among extremists. That's their version of the story anyway; it has some merits, but I myself do not fully endorse it, partly because religious incentives do play a key role towards reeling in disillusioned youth, among others. Clearly, however, the answer is more complicated than you are portraying: religion is not the only instigator here. The two main themes of my argument are that an attack on an abstruse concept like Islam necessarily invites an attack on practitioners and that religion is not the only cause for terrorism. The whilom point implies that banning Islam as a religion in the United States would necessarily lead to the deportation of Muslims. The second implies that squarely blaming Islam for terrorism is an inaccurate apprehension of our problems, meaning that even if we banned Muslims from the United States, we would still not have resolved the fundamental issues driving international terrorism. Ergo, there would still be terrorist attacks against the United States.