Let’s quit trying to suggest that the Islamic State has anything at all to do with religion.

As in Islam, from which it draws its filthy name.

I’ve made a pact that I’m now going to refer to ISIL as a “cult.” I’ll conceded it’s not an original thought. I’m appropriating it from someone who said it on a news-talk show the other day. If I could remember who said it, I’d credit him specifically.

ISIL doesn’t represent anything about Islam.

I shall concede that I am not a Muslim scholar. I have enough trouble trying to understand my own Presbyterian faith, so I cannot pretend to know much at all about Islam.

However, I am quite comfortable lumping ISIL with other infamous cults.

The worst of them in recent times, for me at least, is the Jonestown cult that committed mass suicide in its Guyana jungle compound in 1978 after gunmen murdered Congressman Leo Ryan and others who had gone there to investigate what was going on with the cult gathering organized by the late Jim Jones.

I would rank ISIL as worse than the Jonestown cult, given the nature of the beheadings they’ve shown the world and the manner in which they treat Muslims, Jews and Christians.

As I have noted already, one group victimized by the ISIL cult has been women in general. Thus, it gladdens my heart to hear about the young major in the United Arab Emirates leading a recent air strike against ISIL in Syria. The major, I hasten to add, is a woman. (See the previous post on this blog.)

President Obama has noted already that “no god” condones the kind of violence that ISIL has brought to others. Indeed, the term “Islamic State” is an insult to a great religion.

Do these monsters represent “religious extremism”? No. They represent something far worse.