text: It didn't religions are forming today.  They constantly form and dissolve.  Some religions provide a comprehensive view of the world to all personality types, are self-reflective, and adaptive; most do not.  If you look at the major religions, then you will see the properties.  Localized failures, such as the Reformation, are the result of rigidity in one of the above characteristics.  Heresies, in a given religion, are the result of not the religion being wrong but the failure to stretch and adapt to current needs in favor of strict orthodoxy.  Most heresies have a short life of a few hundred years.