On non-belief and the existence of God

[bennyboy]

They are all describing different things, but touching the same elephant.

Except, if we go into more detail with different religions, we in fact find that someone is touching and describing an elephant, while another describes what sounds like a tiger.
There's way too many claims being made that are mutually exclusive. A simple example is Christianity saying God can be human (aka Jesus) while Islam holds that God could never do that.

"I'm touching big hoofs"
"Yeah, well I'm touching claws"

The question is whether each religion starts with a genuine religious experience, and the experiencer struggles to find metaphor to describe the experience, or not.

I think for the most part, religion is rooted in such an experience by one person (the Buddha would be a good example), and such an attempt, combined with a kind of transmission by guided emulation: "If you do X, you will experience Y, and then you will fully understand metaphor Z." However, as a religion grows, you'll hit a critical mass where most people have NOT done behavior X, have NOT experienced Y, and do NOT experience metaphor Z. Instead, the spiritual tradition gets usurped by power-seekers and snake-oil vendors.

Now, does that original experience represent actual contact with the divine? I don't know; I wouldn't even be able to define things well enough to form an opinion. However, I suspect that the type of experience at the root of most spiritual traditions is similar rather than dissimilar, and that it is intrinsic to the human experience.