I went to a Catholic school as a kid. I can’t remember a single answer from catechism class, but I remember exactly which questions made the room go quiet. Where does a dead person go? Why did a good god need so much blood in the old book? Are the stories true the way two plus two is true? The answer always had the same shape. A kind man who honestly believed he was protecting us would tell us that some things are mysteries and we should have faith. That was the first time I understood that a question can be a kind of misbehaviour. Saying religion removes critical thinking sounds rude, so let me be careful about what I mean. I don’t think religious people are stupid. I’ve known priests who could out-argue me without trying, and a grandmother who read a household better than any therapist. What goes missing isn’t the ability to think. Every child asks why until the room teaches them to stop, and what the room takes away is the reward for asking. You don’t have to remove the ability if you can remove the payoff.

A mind keeps doing what gets approved and quietly drops what gets it isolated. If approval comes for believing harder when the evidence is thin, you’re training someone to get worse at finding out what’s true. And you’re doing it while they’re small, and the only adult being kind to them is the one doing the training. Every religion I know runs some version of this trade, with faith as the virtue and doubt as the sin. It asks you to be most certain exactly where you have the least to go on, and it rewards you for not checking. Some of the books say it outright. Jesus tells Thomas that the ones who haven’t seen and still believe are the blessed ones. It’s a lovely line, and it’s the opposite of how a lab works, where the person who won’t believe until he’s seen it is the one you want.

What stings most is that our own tradition didn’t start out as an answer factory. The Nasadiya Sukta in the Rigveda is about three thousand years old, and it ends by admitting nobody knows, not even the one watching from the highest heaven. The Upanishads are questions passed back and forth between a student and a teacher. The Gita opens with a man who refuses to fight and wants to know why. The oldest things we have come from people who were allowed to say “I don’t know.” Then the institutions arrived and closed the questions into answers, and the asking the tradition was built on became the thing it punished. I’m reading all this as a layman, so if I’ve mangled the history, correct me.

Asking has always cost something. Bruno was burned in 1600 for saying things the Church didn’t want said. Galileo spent the end of his life under house arrest after his 1633 trial, for looking through a tube and reporting what he saw. Copernicus waited until the year he died to publish the book that moved the earth. Those are the famous ones, who paid with their bodies. The millions you never hear about paid with their families. In India, the question you ask at the dinner table can cost you your marriage prospects, your caste, and the people who’d carry you when you’re old. When the price is that high you don’t need bonfires. People just learn the rate.

So what I actually believe is that the capacity stays and the price goes up, and most of us, me included on most days, won’t pay it. A child with a question nobody will answer stops asking. Later they call it peace.

A few years ago I wrote a short note about how our exams reward the exact answer over the answer in your own words. I now think exams inherited that habit more than they invented it. The school is repeating a much older classroom, where the answer was revealed once and improving on it could cost you eternity. A kid who does catechism and then twelve years of board exams is being trained by two institutions that agree on one rule: the sentence you were given is the sentence you repeat.

This is also why I don’t buy the defence that religion is harmless because it’s private. The habit doesn’t stay in the temple. The person who learned to stop at the mystery is the same one who forwards the health tip from an uncle and never asks the doctor what the tablet is for. Deference isn’t something people switch on for one subject. Plenty of people can quote a verse for ten minutes and can’t read a balance sheet. Scientists are the hardest case for my argument. Before Chandrayaan-2 launched in 2019, ISRO’s chairman took a replica of the spacecraft to the Tirumala temple, as ISRO chiefs have long done before launches. I’m not mocking him. These are people who can compute an orbit to the metre, and I can’t fix my own inverter. What I’m pointing at is that the same person can run the numbers for months and then hand the outcome to a deity the weekend before launch, as if there were one room in the head where checking isn’t allowed.

I left the church and the temples a long time ago, and I still catch the reflex in myself. It usually shows up as wanting someone with authority to hand me the answer so I can stop carrying the question. The people I’ve learned to trust are the ones who say “I don’t know” and then go and find out. My own idea of dharma doesn’t ask me to believe anything. It asks me to do the work and check whether it holds. And the Gita, as I read it, is a conversation that never closes into a verdict, which may be why it ended up locked inside sermons.

What I can actually do about any of this is small. When a kid asks why the sky is blue, or why the neighbour died, or where we go when we die, the room has about a second to decide what to do. I’d rather my kid get a wrong answer they can test than a holy answer they can’t touch.

If a room ever taught you to stop asking, I want to hear which question it was. I am @troysk704.