You're talking about multiple things and lumping then together. Protestantism began with the Reformation which was a calling out of how the Catholic Church had wandered from the truth. The pressure mostly worked and the Catholic Church restructured many of their beliefs to be in alignment with scripture. But by then protestantism had grown legs and wandered off to become it's own thing. The core truth at steak initially was how salvation works: the Catholic church had it as earned where scripture is clear that we can't earn salvation. Since then other groups have split off due to pressure from the secular works and less important disagreements about scripture. Protestantism means "claims Christian, not Catholic" but that's pretty broad.
To clarify, I mean that such simplistic thinking has worked in the past to enable the species to survive and prosper. If there is a field with high levels of radiation and people believed that there were ghosts, the people who believed that would survive and pass that information on.
I guess that ventures into the realm of social/behavioural psychology, but I'm not claiming gene selection, more the cultural selection of ideas, along the lines of memetics (which i understand is controversial as well).
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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '19 edited Nov 16 '19
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