“Religion and law among our masses must be one and the same,” his father said. “An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties. This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience and greater bravery. We must depend not so much on the bravery of individuals, you see, as upon the bravery of a whole population.”

Kynes’s dead father says these words in Book II, when Kynes is on the verge of death and hallucinating in the desert of Arrakis. Kynes’s father states that religion’s purpose is to steer a relatively ignorant impressionable population toward a particular goal. Kynes’s father used religion to help steer the Fremen, the indigent population of Arrakis, a people yearning for a leader. Kynes and his father used religion to earn the loyalty of the fierce Fremen with the purpose of transforming Arrakis from a desert world into a green paradise. In addition, they seek to use religion to end the crime that accompanies the illicit trade of melange.

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