A religion’s success depends upon its having followers. A reliable technique for getting and keeping followers is the threat of divine punishment for infidels. Believe and get a great reward; don’t believe and get a horrible punishment. God can read your mind, so there’s no use faking belief.

The Gospel of John says, “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:18, NIV) Only a handful of people had heard of Jesus in his time, much less believed he was God’s son, so this was a declaration of damnation for virtually the entire human race in the early first century. Whether Jesus actually said it is a separate question. Evangelical Christians place great stock in this assertion, whatever its source.

The idea that belief gets vast rewards and its absence gets vast punishment is tremendously useful to religious leaders, but it’s poison for the mind. If you think your mind is under God’s ceaseless surveillance and that he’ll punish you for not having the right beliefs, thinking is a deadly danger. Thought can lead to doubt, doubt to disbelief, and disbelief to Hell. You have to force your mind to believe. Once you do that, you’ve corrupted your mind. As John Galt said in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:

Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else — that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind.

You can’t know in advance where a process of thinking might lead. Once you fear that Big Son is watching, you have to guard all your thoughts against heresy. The safest way to do that is to think as little as possible.

If our corporeal existence here is merely the larval stage of an eternal life and disbelief leads to damnation afterward, then promoting disbelief is more harmful than any disease that only kills people. It makes perfect sense to imprison, torture, and execute heretics to prevent them from spreading the contamination of doubt. For centuries, Christian governments and inquisitions operated on this premise. People in non-Christian lands had to be conquered and converted to save them from a fate worse than death.

Today, imprisonment and execution for heresy in predominantly Christian countries is rare, but people still build prisons for their own minds. Thinking that the right beliefs are the prerequisite for avoiding Hell, they have to avoid thoughts that could lead to doubt. They live in a surveillance state of their own making.

Yet there’s no lock on the prison door. All they have to do is walk out, but it’s frightening.