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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 grim calculus, was performing a brutal act of supposed spiritual charity.

This mirrors—but is crucially different from—the core doctrine of Frankism, an 18th-century Jewish heretical movement. Frankists believed in 'redemption through sin.' Their goal was not personal regret, but a cosmological sabotage: transgressing the old law to shatter the spiritual shells trapping divine sparks and force a new messianic age. The pleasure or suffering of the sinner was incidental to this metaphysical mission.

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 beheaded Western captives, the logic switched entirely to theater of terror—a spectacle for global propaganda.

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 utterly separate from secular humanism, which is why it seems so alien and 'irrational' to the modern Western mind.