confused about 'into the actions which'

Question

I am confused with the syntactic structure of the sentence in bold, especially the last part. Can anyone help explain?

An intention to do something wrong or against the law is rarely considered as bad as when the intention gets fulfilled. If we could be prosecuted solely for our intentions, however distant from success, we should almost all have criminal records. A comparison may be made with those religious doctrines which seem to collapse psychological states, including ones even more remote from actions than intentions, into the actions which would typically result. Following the New Testament, an American president, Jimmy Carter, accepted that lusting in one’s heart for a woman other than one’s wife is morally the same as the act of adultery. More recently, some extreme feminists have bizarrely claimed that watching the portrayal of rape is the same as raping. ——the big think book

Answer 1

The verb phrase is collapse ... something ... into .... something else.

The magician collapsed a bouquet of roses into a handful of dust.

The sentence in question is not very clear in that regard because it is somewhat elliptical:

... doctrines which seem to collapse psychological states ... into the actions that would typically result [from those states of mind]

Moreover, collapse is being used figuratively there, not literally. It could be paraphrased as "reducing something to something else". Thoughts are collapsed into the deeds the thinker is thinking about doing. For example, lustful thoughts are reduced (when so "collapsed") to lustful actions. Such religious doctrines would consider them equally culpable. Any distinctions between thought and deed that would cause one to treat them as different things would be ignored.

Another way of putting it:

A comparison may be made with those religious doctrines which conflate thought and deed, even when there is no intention whatsoever to commit the acts imagined.