This monastery in Blaubeuren, near Ulm in Germany, was the first place we visited as tourists while staying with our friends. Not only was the area gorgeous, but the monastery itself - dating from something like 1085 - was exquisite. It felt so peaceful being there and the elegant simplicity of the artworks and architecture provided a perfect environment for reflection (and somehow it all drew your eyes upwards).

Add to that the visit to the Ulmer Münster, St Georg's church, Marienskirche, other beautiful churches around Germany, gorgeous cathedrals in England... The amazing works of art in terms of statues, paintings, just the simple decorations; the way the architects of the buildings manage to create spaces that feel truly peaceful and sacred (and jolly cold on occasion... but that's the magic of thick stone walls).

Then visiting the Pergamon and Altes Museums in Berlin, there was some amazing artwork from religions from even longer ago. Statues, vases, carvings, scrolls, special holders for sacred texts... Expressions of personal and public faith, people using their talents to glorify what they believe in.

Religion has created so many beautiful things.

And then it's also been so wrong sometimes. I think people like to seize on the wrong things and use them as their reasons for avoiding religious experiences, which can be beneficial. But even for me as a Christian, there are a lot of things I'm not comfortable with in Christian history - there seemed to be a lot of smiting going on and the use of a particular denominational belief to go wild on hating others from another denominational belief (and then add the way women tend to get the rough end of the stick courtesy of religious leaders going, "My God, it's a woman! Shouldn't she be back in the kitchen!?") (and Christian fundamentalists).

The recent honours given to Salman Rushdie by the Queen that have irritated peope in Iran, etc because they feel that The Satanic Verses were an insult to the prophet and the way in which the honours have renewed their flag-burning, fatwa-issuing desires have made me wonder how often religions - and no, I do not mean only Islam, even though the reaction of people in Iran has triggered the train of thought - are used to destroy rather than build up.

While we were in England, we went to Winchester Cathedral where the guide told us about how the Puritans came through and smashed the windows in the church, dug up and desecrated the graves of the Saxon kings and generally tried to wreck as much as they could because they thought icons, memorials, statues, etc were bad and their way of worship was the one true way. By getting rid of the windows that showed scenes from the Bible, destroying statues and so on, they were "purifying" the church.

One cannot help but feel angry about such desecration. I think people doing things like that says more about their own problems with faith and religious experiences than it does about those they're trying to make see the errors of their ways. If people feel so insecure knowing that there are other forms of worship out there or that people don't believe as they do or whatever it might be that they have to go out and act violently, how can that be expected to reflect well on their "faith"?

Reading more about the way in which people sought freedom with puritanism actually ended up being more repressed than ever, particularly with those who moved to America (witch trials anyone?), also raises questions about the way in which the beauty that can be part of religious experience can be utterly annihilated by a few people being morons.

And that's not something that's just confined to the past and no religion has a monopoly on it. There's fear of other expressions of faith and the desire to destroy the "foreign" or "other" things. Maybe that says more about our conditions as humans than about our religious experiences, though.

It's a shame that there's not more of an effort to stop and look at the potential for beauty.