The topic of violence and art can be viewed from many perspectives, from the depiction of violence to people who inflict violence on art. Here, the focus is on the ‘violence in our thinking’. Can one's thinking inflict violence on things? Can cold, scientific thinking, thinking in prejudice, or ideological thinking inflict violence on works of art? Here, we address how this happens and how one can confront this violence against works of art. How can it be healed? Through this, the difference between the violence of Thinking and Thinking as a Battle will be explained. At the center of this argument, we discuss the Contemplative Seeing of the World (Welt-Anschauung) which enables an honest seeing. This means becoming friends.

This article examines religious hate speech as a discursive technology that constructs adversaries through conceptual antinomies, enabling moral disengagement and legitimising exclusion or violence. It draws on interdisciplinary perspectives from philosophy, law, sociology, and theology and discusses significant cases—including the Northern Ireland Troubles, ISIS propaganda, Hindu extremist rhetoric against Christians, and Buddhist ultranationalism against Rohingya Muslims—demonstrating how religious identities intersect with other factors to create hostile narratives. The article explores definitional challenges, distinguishes hate speech from incitement to genocide and blasphemy laws, and examines US and European legal approaches. It reveals that hate speech produces multilayered harms affecting individuals, targeted groups, and democratic processes, with causal factors including ideological antinomies, political manipulation, and social media amplification. The study argues that combating religious hate speech requires moving beyond punitive criminal law to embrace restorative justice, interfaith solidarity, counter-speech initiatives, and educational programs. Only through multifaceted collective efforts can societies preserve democratic values and protect vulnerable populations from discrimination and marginalization.

The aim of this essay is to reflect on a particular form of violence, that caused by the short circuit between faith and religious ethics, between the liberating dimension of the experience of God's love and the need to derive from it a practical ethic that promotes human coexistence and is an expression of that love. In the Christian experience—but also in Judaism and Islam—it is possible for a reversal to take place whereby ethics ends up preceding and judging faith. This is a form of moralism, very similar to religious fundamentalism, made possible by the reversal between the purpose of faith (to live the experience of God's love to the full) and the ways and expressions that should express and realize it in practical life. This reversal occurs when moral action is an end in itself and has lost the criteria of judgment through which moral discernment is achieved. Through the interpretative story of the Decalogue (Ex 20:1-17), the thesis argued in this essay is that moralistic rigor enacts a true form of violence both against the religious tradition it claims to protect and against the believing community, preventing or limiting its dialogue with the challenges of the present that would allow it to keep the experience of faith alive.