Do religions develop new forms as adaptations to new environments?
Yep. If you study religion(s) and how they work, it’s very like a virus. It tends to be passed on to the children of religious people, and at a time when children are conditioned to obey their elders unquestioningly. When your kid is about to fall from a great height, burn themselves or walk into the road, or try to play with a poisonous snake, it is necessary that when you yell “Stop!” they stop. There is no time for them to have a debate about it, and there is no point in letting them learn by experience if they are going to die of that experience. So children tend to obey unquestioningly when a parent tells them they must say their prayers. Later, when they start to think for themselves it is often too late; they are living in a community of other people who all reinforce the dogma they have been hearing all their lives. For this reason, religion is more like a disease that transmits itself from generation to generation. And one of the hallmarks of diseases is that they change and a
