While I agree that there are certainly aspects that reflect what you are saying, I still think it’s hard to support the case you are. With mosques all over the world and calls to prayer numerous times per day, I don’t see how you can deny that it is a religion. It may be a false religion, but it is a religion.
Do you disagree?
They face the head of the Islamic empire when they do that.
We face our flag at morning assembly in homeroom, baseball games, and other functions.
Do we worship our flag?
Do you disagree?
Yes, most emphatically, as do the overwhelming majority of people I know and speak with. I could attempt to reinvent the wheel and state my case, calmly and logically, but someone else has done it more thoroughly than I have been able to do. Religion must be more than the simple claim that it exists, and the presence of hundreds of places of "worship". Obviously, even you would agree that if all mosques revealed their true purpose and bristled with machine guns RPGs and explosives, regardless of how many there are, that they were not really a "religion".
Check out the calmer reasoning:
Do you disagree?