One of the few things that religion can do good is to gather resources for art. It is not free art, it can be very narrow minded, but it can be awesomely beautiful.
Given that most of people here comes from Christian background, what examples of nice pieces of art that this religion have produced.
Post here, sculptures, paintings, music, architecture, etc.
I start with this pieces that i saw In Warsaw this summer.
Most of this sculptures, paintings etc were made to tell the stories to a population that was illiterate, the details and the many things happening at the same time is awesome.
(and yes we know that all of this was paid in peasant blood, it is not the discussion here =)
Artists commissioned by churches or any religion was interesting in that they made deities in the image of whoever was paying. Jesus turn Italian, so many different renderings of buda and kirsna. OK. My spell check just went nuts. I guess the powers that be still control us visually. Lol
I'm not religious but I love to see beautiful cathedrals and the stained glass in churches.
Here are some photos I took of Salisbury Cathedral (Wiltshire, England) a couple of months ago. The church is one of the leading examples of Early English architecture. It has a tall spire and a large cloister. It contains a clock which is among the oldest working clocks in the world (about AD 1386), and has the best surviving of the four original copies of Magna Carta.
I can understand a peasant from the middle ages seeing this and thinking only god or god blessed men could build this kind of stuff. Today we are used with big buildings, but those churches were colossal for a common peasant, and the details ciuld not be explained besides god power XD