Since you're into elevated debate, I'll tell you why I responded very negatively to your original post. You said "How many husbands have killed their wives (or

Since you're into elevated debate, I'll tell you why I responded very negatively to your original post. You said "How many husbands have killed their wives (or vice versa) in the last 9 years? We should ban marriage and investigate the religions that promote it!!". You were clearly trying to make me look bad by using heavy sarcasm to draw a parallel between the number of deaths caused by spousal murders vs the 9/11 attack. But it's a very bad comparison because murder is not a fundamental property of marriage. No one gets married in order to murder their spouse, or murders their spouse to bring glory to marriage. On the other hand, jihad terrorism is a defining property of the brand of Islam practiced by the 9/11 attackers and thousands of other people throughout the world. Nihilism is the rejection of meaning, and if you can't see that the 9/11 attacks had meaning well beyond the death toll, both to the attackers and the victims - and I'm not talking about the reactions to the event - then you're a nihilist. It was an unprecedented military-style mass murder of civilians by organized, motivated enemies who also had their own set of beliefs. They weren't just some guys who randomly decided to fly two aircraft into downtown Manhattan. It wasn't a human mistake. And it wasn't an earthquake that killed a lot of people.