Does religion make humans violent?

Every time an attack is carried out in the name of God, the question arises again—and almost always receives the same hasty answer: take a single faith, put it on trial, lining up its darkest verses as charges, and the verdict is served. But this is exactly how the recruiters of terror reason: the fundamentalist and his most ferocious enemy read the holy book in exactly the same way.

Are these books dangerous? The first part of the work, The Sword and the Sacred , compares five great traditions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism—and their bloodiest texts, to demonstrate a thesis as uncomfortable as it is well-documented: no religion is "the problem." Sacred violence does not arise from a particular faith, but from a way of reading and a mindset that can dress up in any belief, and even secular garb. The real divide lies not between religions, but within each of them.

And if not violence, what made the Bible and the Quran the most widely read books in human history? Were their most ferocious verses what made them immortal? Is man drawn to evil—or to the sublime and the terrible?

The second part, "The Allure of the Terrible ," dismantles one of the most widespread and false ideas: that what keeps us gripped by those pages is a dark lure of horror. It's not evil that fascinates. It's the terrible: the grandeur that overwhelms us, the vertiginous sublime, the absolute frankness with which these texts express everything we are, the ambiguity that makes them inexhaustible, the sound that etches them into our memory. Understanding why billions of people continue to read them isn't diagnosing a disease, but recognizing a profoundly human response to the real power of the sacred word.

The third part, "Interpretation of the Essence of Sacred Texts ," takes the final step: from fear to wonder, to serenity. It offers a proposal for how to approach an ancient book today without isolating oneself and without betraying either faith or reason, distinguishing what is an eternal message from what is merely history.

Three parts, one path: from mistrust to peace, passing through wonder.

And then, as the conclusion suggests, this isn't just a one-time read: it's a reminder to return to whenever a massacre committed in the name of God leads you to accuse an entire faith; whenever a terrible passage of Scripture troubles you; whenever your own faith begins to separate you from others; whenever the certainty of being right leads you to despise someone. Because the truths that matter aren't those learned only once, but those to which we must return.

A work that asks neither belief nor disbelief, but simply to look at the sacred texts honestly—without ever letting fear read the pages for you. Because a book that has spanned the centuries cannot be reduced to a weapon, a symptom, or a rule.