If religion began with a single encounter...

If we assume, for the sake of the argument, that the major religious traditions of humanity ultimately descend from a single ancient event involving a non-human intelligence, then religion begins to look very different. Instead of asking which religion got the story right, we would have to ask a different question: what information survived after thousands of years of cultural transmission, reinterpretation, and distortion? Under that assumption, the original event may have been experienced b...