"The church was finally forced to turn to the "Pagan" Aristotle and his teacher, Plato, to save its theological bacon. The monumental work of St. Thomas Aquinas, which is the foundation of Roman Catholic theology...is based on the writings of Aristotle..."
Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ
"If Christianity will now recognize that the time has come to join with the other great living religious traditions, and direct its vision to the reawakening of the divine spirit, the Christos in man, it may yet vindicate its right to call its message the true religion of humanity."
Alvin Boyd Kuhn, A Rebirth for Christianity
"He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation."
Mithras (Persian God)
"I think immense changes could be brought by a Christianity...that was no longer crippled by notions of heresy, infallibility, or exclusiveness of a kind that should be totally renounced and not rationalized to the slightest decree. Such a Christianity might represent the age of the Spirit."
Northrop Fry, quoted in Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ
"...the fact that most of the material in the Jesus story was previously extant in other sacred literature of the ancient world in no way detracts from its power and relevance for our lives today. If something is true and portrays a deep reality, it remains true forever. Things are not simply true because someone somewhere first said them, or because they are collected in books like the Bible. They are true because they ring with full authenticity on the anvils of our souls."
Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ
"As long as Christians believe in a flesh-and-blood man...as God…thus forever alienating Jews, Muslims, and believers of a host of other religions…it makes full religious harmony on the planet a perpetual impossibility."
Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ
"Horus rides on the back of a donkey…The divine element in every person rides into glory on the back of the animal self."
Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ
"All scripture is by nature allegorical."
Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ
"His was the mystical Christ known down through the ages, the so-called Pagan Christ, the ray of the cosmic Logos, who was and remains non-historical, having neither beginning of days nor end of life."
Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ
"The very thing which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients also, nor was it wanting, from the inception of the human race until the coming of Christ in the flesh, at which point the true religion, which was already in existence, began to be called Christian."
St. Augustine, Retractiones
"Those who lack discrimination may quote the letter of Scripture, but they are really denying the inner truth."
The Bhagavad-Gita
"Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
But not with thyself, thy soul will be forlorn;
The cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain
Unless within thyself it be set up again."
Angelus Silesius (1624-1677)