I suppose to discuss religions in any meaningful way, you need to look at their brain effects. This thing looks like a good starter (so you don't need to delve into primary research publications). Well, I also found a useful quick-lookup, Sapolsky's lecture on biology of religiosity
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neurology-and-religion/FE245A58770B5986B10B86F6B39EB746
Too late "not to torture people to make them grow their minds" 💁
It is what school education is about, we are forcing insane amounts of ideas and data through children's minds. That causes radical and powerful transformations in their monkey brains.
That's not very pleasant for most kids, learning. Some teenagers develop obvious disturbances in social and overall behavior (we call them "geeks", "girls-bas-bleau")
But as result some of the "tortured souls" turn into readers and authors of this forum :-)