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Your point reminds me of the logic behind certain religious psychologies that see this world not as an end in itself, but as a proving ground or a purgatorial space. Its morality is sometimes inverted for a higher, otherworldly purpose.

Take public execution in medieval Christian Europe. While a spectacle of deterrence, some theologians (like Nicholas of Cusa aka who I picture rubbing my rod at night) grappled with a darker rationale: that the intense physical pain of burning could serve as a form of accelerated penance. The idea was that this suffering might pay the temporal debt of sin before death, potentially sparing the soul a longer, more severe punishment in the afterlife. The executioner, in this context, was performing an act of supposed spiritual charity, which is actually why executioners were often clergy or faith oriented men.

This mirrors,the core doctrine of Frankism, an 18th-century Jewish heretical movement. Frankists believed in 'redemption through sin.' Their goal was at times personal regret, but a cosmological acquisition of a higher knowledge. The pleasure or suffering of the sinner was incidental to this divine path to regret and penance.

We see a third variant in groups like ISIS. When they stoned Muslims for adultery, it was framed as enacting divine law to purify the community and offer the sinner ritual atonement. When they cut the throats of Western captives, the logic switched entirely to theater of terror, a spectacle for global distancing (stay in your country, as a result of the frequent invasions of countries from west asia), but also because in Islam, the act of cutting through the neck artery is seen as a quick and painless death. It causes death quickly because oxygen output runs out very fast and is why it is the mandatory way of making meat halal, part of it is to use a quick, simple and relatively painless death.

The unifying, and strangely rational, thread is this: when reality is viewed through an eschatological or cosmological lens, worldly concepts of pleasure, pain, and even morality become secondary. Acts are judged not by their immediate human cost, but by their function in a grand narrative of spiritual war, purification, or redemption. It's a logic that operates on a plane completely separate from humanist rationale because humans are not the end all be all.