Most people think of religious fanaticism as blind obedience: follow every rule, wear the correct clothing, recite the exact words, never deviate.

There exists, however, a much darker and far more intoxicating tradition that says the exact opposite:

The truest proof that you belong to God is to deliberately, joyfully, and repeatedly violate the deepest taboos of human society—while still feeling God’s love pour through you.

This is transgression as salvation.

It is not rebellion against God. It is rebellion against humanity in order to prove, once and for all, that your loyalty is to a higher law that no earthly court can judge.

The Logic Is Brutally Simple

1. Ordinary obedience can always be faked. Even hypocrites pray.
2. Ordinary sin can be repented. Even murderers can be forgiven.
3. But if you commit the one act that every culture agrees is unforgivable—incest, blasphemy, ritual murder, sacrilege—and you still feel divine election burning in your chest, then your salvation is mathematically certain.

You have done the one thing no mere pretender would dare. You have risked not just social death but metaphysical annihilation. And God did not abandon you.

That rush you feel afterward is not ordinary adrenaline. It is the electric confirmation that you are one of the elect.

The Classroom Example, Stripped Bare

Imagine the professor says: “Tomorrow, everyone must shoplift something small. No excuses. This is the price of true empowerment.”

Your stomach drops. Every social alarm screams. You picture handcuffs, expulsion, your mother’s face.

Then you do it.

You walk out of the store with a stolen candy bar clenched in your fist. No one stopped you. The sky did not fall. And suddenly you are flooded with a manic, almost orgasmic energy: exhilaration, lightness, invincibility.

That feeling is the ancient religious payoff.

You have broken the universal law and the universe still holds you. You have spat in the face of human morality and felt the divine smile in return.

Historical Footprints (Always Erased)

1. Medieval antinomian sects who practiced ritual incest “because the children of God are not bound by the laws given to slaves.”
2. Certain 17th-century Ranters who paraded naked through villages shouting blasphemies, claiming the Spirit told them to.
3. Fringe Masonic and occult groups that required initiates to curse God aloud—then wait for the lightning that never came.

Every society buries these stories quickly, because once the mechanism is understood, it can be weaponized by anyone ruthless enough to use it.

The Modern, Sanitized Version

We no longer call it salvation. We call it “edginess,” “authenticity,” “living your truth,” or “breaking the matrix.”

But the emotional circuitry is identical:

1. The first time you cheat and get away with it.
2. The secret affair that makes you feel more alive than your marriage ever did.
3. The anonymous online post that finally says the forbidden thing—and the dopamine flood when the world doesn’t end.

Each time you push across a line you were taught was sacred and feel the rush instead of the lightning bolt, a tiny voice whispers the ancient message:

“You are special. The normal rules were never meant for you. You are beyond.”

That whisper is the secular ghost of the oldest, darkest solution to the crisis of faith.

Transgression does not free you from God. It convinces you that God has freed you from everything else.