One of my favorite quotes of all times by henry ford reflects your statementent "Wether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right."

But I guess my last comment was more to highlight something odd about religious psychology and it is that this planet is not the end goal and that anything done here has implications on the judgement of your character in the afterlife to a faithful person. I guess religious execution would be a good example: In the modern times (this was not just in the middle ages), humans were still burned alive but the goal was not the spectacle as it often is assumed to be. When you read through proper literature from cardinals and theologians of those ages, (my favorite being Nicholas De Cusa which has written on this) the reason they practiced death by fire is because the pain was seen as an instrument to make the sinner regret their actions, allowing them to receive a quicker punishment for their actions here than endure what the christian god would give them in hell. This is therefore an attempt at saving their soul rather than a way to give everyone a show or even to deter other potential sinners by the public spectacle. And this in turn also was seen by the executioner as a way of acquiring more praise from god because they forced someone through a terrible situation, salvating the nature of their soul from any malice BEFORE they pass (meaning they saved the soul by lighting the body on fire). Frankism follows the same logic, sinning as a way to see the evil in sinning before you die and therefore being of higher religious value than a common soul which has not sinned as much. Because the pleasure in sinful acts is not the focus, what is the focus is that sinning brings suffering to even the sinner. This can be understood by false analogies like how a thief or a murderer will not acquire happiness from their act despite those acts being pleasurable to them. Because pleasure and happiness are not the same. Pleasure is ephemeral, happiness lasts. But knowledge also lasts, and so the murderer or thief will be brought to realizing the evil of their ways prior to death, following the assumption that most people experience the regret for sins they have commited before their passing.

And the same goes for ISIS which would stone some of their prisonners, typically when they were muslims as a way of saving them before their passage, strangely they prefered to just kill the caucasian prisonners right away by beheading which then was indeed for the spectale and deterrence of western visitors. This world is weird sometimes.