Paul
My answers to such questions tend to come out horribly garbled but I'll have a shot at it.
I agree with what you say on how religions get started. It seems obvious from the evidence that our major religions are founded on misreadings of the prophets. This complaint is regularly made of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. The problem does not really crop up in the mystical religions because these are religions in a different sense of the word, and in these one is not expected to believe the words of any prophet or master but rather to is expected to follow in their footsteps and thus attain their knowledge for oneself. Thus the criticism of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, as these doctrines are so often taught, is, ironically, most often and most vociferously made by Christian mystics, Sufis and Advaita Vedantists. (This is the whole argument about the non-canonical gospels, for example, for in these Jesus gives the mystical view of cosmology, not a theist view).
The question "How can something exist without either starting or always existing?" can be addressed by asking what the words mean. For most people 'something' will mean a thing that exists in space and time. If it means this then the answer to the question is 'It cannot'. If something exists in time and space then it has a beginning and an end. (I know Hawking argues that time might have a beginning but not an end, but he hasn't yet shown that this idea is not absurd).
The same argument applies to the term 'exists' - what most people mean by 'exists', certainly what most scientists mean, is 'exists in space and time'. Given this meaning then anything that exists must have a beginning, and again the answer would be 'It cannot'.
But the question can be interpreted differently. In the nondual cosmology what is fundamental, the ultimate phenomenon, transcends the distinction between existing and not-existing and between some-thing and no-thing. In fact it transcends all such 'dual' distinctions so, for instance, this 'thing' has no properties and all properties, is both extended and not extended, is differentiated and undifferentiated, both a void and a plenum and so on ad infinitum. (cf Spencer Brown's mathematical model of cosmogenesis, in which forms arise in the void by the reification of these false distinctions).
This seems a strange idea but if it were true it would very straighforwardly explain why metaphysical question are undecidable, and no other explanation has yet been proposed.
The easiest way to conceive of the nonduality of the ultimate phenomenon, it seems to me, is in terms of superposition and complementarity. But this is just a helpful device, and there is complete agreement among mystics and meditators that in fact it is impossible to conceive of it.
All those who propound this view assert that this strange property or state of ultimate reality cannot be understood except by direct experience. However, now that physics has progressed sufficiently the assertions that space and time are not fundamental, and that something can be in many states at the same time and so on, begin to seem less odd than they used to, and we can speculate that this 'something' is inconceivable for the same reason that wavicles are inconceivable, which is that according to reason a thing must be either a particle or a wave, must be local or non-local, must exist against a spacetime background or not and so forth.
In the mystical view what is fundamental to existence is not a corporeal or mental phenomenon. It does not exist in the way that other phenomena exist, and it is in a sense beyond spacetime, beyond temporality and extension. The Nibbana of Buddhism, for example, is, metaphorically at least, rather like another dimension, in contact with every point in the physical universe but itself unextended, like a curled-up or compacted fifth dimension in M-theory, or like the hyperspace of science fiction. This is reminiscent of Neo's Matrix-world, in which spatial extension is an illusion, since all points in Neo's universe are the same point, the point at which his self-consciousness exists, in a brain in a vat in a machine somewhere entirely outside of his phenomenal universe. Non-locality would be easy to explain in the Matrix, where naive realism is about as wrong as it could be.
This problem with how to define 'something' and 'exist' in your question is avoided by various methods in mystical writings. In Taoist philosophy, for instance, the ultimate is often referred to as 'something', the scare quotes signifying that it should not be thought of as a thing or object. Likewise, it is said that the Tao (Allah, Nibbana, Unicity etc) is, not that it exists, because the term 'exists' implies the notion of spacetime, and this 'something' is beyond spacetime.
Actually what I've said here is not quite right. One reason for this, in addition to my ignorance, is that it's very difficult to talk about this 'something' in everyday terms for the same reason it is very difficult to talk about wavicles in mathematical terms. One must take a wavicle to be a wave or a particle in mathematics, while in fact it not a wave, not a particle, not neither a wave nor a particle and not both a wave and a particle. I'm not suggesting that Nibbana, the Tao etc. is a wavicle, (although to me this would make scientific sense) but rather that some of the concepts that have had to be developed in QM are useful when thinking about the idea of 'nonduality', and that the dual nature of its explandum causes the same epistemilogical and linguistic problems in Taoism as it does in QM and quantum cosmology.
It is important to say that this 'nondual' cosmological view is not speculative, but based on 'knowledge by identity', on first-person empirical evidence. It can be argued that it is built on a delusion, or a series of self-delusions, but this can only be decided by first-person research.
Does that make any sense at all? I doubt it. If not I'll post a couple of links to much better answers.
Canute
I appreciate your efforts, but I just don't see it. How does your path of knowing through selection account for all the properties of physicalness, for instance? If you say every physical property is a thought, then explain how the thinker of the thought came be. If you say the thinker has always been, then it seems the thinker, being omniscient, should be able think a perfect creation; yet creation is far from perfect.