A certeza violenta

Abstract

This article investigates the epistemic foundation of religious violence through two Platonic dialogues: the Crito and the Euthyphro. The central hypothesis is that violence exercised in the name of the sacred does not derive from wickedness or absence of faith, but from its excess — specifically, from unexamined religious certainty. The argument unfolds through three progressive aporias: the indeterminacy of the concept of violence (ch. 1), the structure of religious violence and its internal logic (ch. 2), and the Socratic aporia as both an epistemological diagnosis and an alternative practice (ch. 3). It is argued that Socrates' maieutic method does not dissolve faith but reveals what certainty conceals — and that epistemic humility, attested across diverse religious and philosophical traditions, constitutes the most rigorous response to the problem of violence perpetrated in the name of the divine.