Mathemagician, with all due respect, many Protestants seem, at least to me, unaware that for the first 1054 years of its earthly existence, and in many places for a couple of hundred more years, The Church was in fact the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church complete and undivided. For reasons not here relevant, the Church split into the Roman West and the Orthodox East. From Apostolic times to the 1500s, all Christians, East or West, used and venerated icons. It was not an Eastern or Western, Orthodox or Roman Catholic thing, it was a Christian thing. When the Protestant Reformation took place, Protestant leaders, Luther in particular, for reasons good or ill, determined to adopt a dogma of sola scriptura, a hitherto unknown concept in the Church. By using a sort of Western systematic type theology and cut loose from or rejecting most of what the Church called and calls Holy Tradition, the early Protestant Divines developed a completely new and different religion than had prevailed for the previous 1500+ years and which prevails to this day for most Christians. I must say, from the outside looking in as there has never been anything like the Reformation in the Orthodox East, that when the first Protestants adopted sola scriptura, they threw out the baby with the bathwater. The wholesale rejection of the 1500 year old meaning of the sacraments, the Apostolic Succession, the writings of all the Fathers except +Augustine of Hippo, really did create an atmosphere where every man's a pope and there are more that 2300 Protestant groupings in the US alone, all claiming to have the correct interpretation of the Bible. There are few Romans today who would argue that there were not evil practices which had crept into the Roman Church by 1500. The same is true in the East. But the reaction, which seems to me was really about the particular practices of a particular set of popes and their political allies, was an overreaction brought about by men who had a very, very limited understanding of the practices of the early Church which had been preserved for the most part in the East, though Martin Luther himself had a very high regard for Orthodoxy. You might want to read the series of letters between a group of Lutheran Divines during the period 1574-1582 with Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople. Here is a link to a site which contains the correspondence and has an excellent discussion of the state of the Christian world which formed the backround of the letters. Please read this and you'll understand some of what I have been talking about.
http://www.stpaulsirvine.org/html/sixteenthcentury.htm