Very well written, thank you. I agree with this person, and you about the forces that drive a movement like ISIS. My point was that fundamentalism is something beyond religion, unless one would define religion as fundamentalism, which may in fact be what he/she is doing? We have seen many horrible movements not the least during the last hundred years. Some of these movements expressly identified as non-religious, notably Stalin's reign and to a lesser extend the Nazis.

The deeper issue in my view is that the special human trait that ISIS is nurturing and promoting is basically the same you need in any highly oppressive regime. Yes, ISIS use religion, Islam as the tool to achieve this. And yes it will be useful to understand the specifics of their logic if you want to predict the specific ways they express those human traits. But the Stalin's helpers, those who ran Gulag, those who carried out massacres in Ukraine and other provinces, and, the Nazis, Boko Haram. The Japanese before World War II carried out some of the most gruesome atrocities. Putin's allies in Chechnya, Mau Zedong's Cultural Revolution. They were all drawing on the same kind of fundamentalism that ISIS is drawing on. A human trait that allows the ingroup ("us") to dehumanize the outgroup ("them").

My point is that this is not religion but a human trait. Religion may be a way for some to justify this trait, or, as I mentioned in the beginning, this trait may indeed be the core of religion. If so then all such movements are religious even if they call themselves anti religious.

A related point is how