The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
Salman Rushdie...The lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'.
Salman Rushdie