Ken Eckerty

“The crossing of the Red Sea is, according to the allegorical or symbolic meaning, really the entrance into matter. Water always stands for matter in the esoteric wisdom. The well-known story of the forty years the Jews spent wandering in the wilderness was a mythical construct that was symbolic of the soul's life in the body during its earthly sojourn.”
― Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?

“Christianity and Judaism place great emphasis on a God of love, although some verses of the Bible appear to really jumble this message. What are we to think of a God who allows – or even orders – some of His holy men to commit mass murder? In Elijah’s slaughter of the Baal priests, he does not even say this was commanded by the Lord as is the justification in some other Old Testament atrocities. Should any serious Bible student just ignore such mayhem? Or should one accept that this is God’s way of punishing the wicked and no man has the right to question His methods? I say this is totally contrary to the action of love. Honesty demands that we recognize that much of the Bible was not inspired by a God of love. A God that commands or disregards mass murder by his holiest people is not a God most people would like to spend eternity with. I think the better view is that God did not inspire the writings of the Bible to any more of a degree than He inspired the writing of this book or any other book. What we read in the Bible came from the thoughts of the biblical authors. Many penned their best understanding of God within the cultural and social fabric of their day and age.”
― J L Miller, The Holy and the Hereafter or is it Hooey?

“We know how the Church has for centuries insisted that Christ is every person and represents us all. But as we have seen, in the myth there is encapsulated the profound reality that the opposite is true as well. As each of us becomes aware of his or her true essence as a body-spirit entity and awakens the Christ within, he or she too is Christ. No longer is it a case of looking outside ourselves to emulate a remote historical figure. Rather, it's a matter of knowing ourselves to be wholly one with the very same energies and principles that in the drama are shown driving him. Thus, as Carl Jung describes it, each individual can discover that he or she is "imbued with a latent divinity.”
― Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?

“The controversy over resurrection, then, proved critical in shaping the Christian movement into an institutional religion. All Christians agreed in principle that only Christ himself—or God—can be the ultimate source of spiritual authority. But the immediate question, of course, was the practical one: Who, in the present, administers that authority? Valentinus and his followers answered: Whoever comes into direct, personal contact with the “living One.” They argued that only one’s own experience offers the ultimate criterion of truth, taking precedence over all secondhand testimony and all tradition—even gnostic tradition! They celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive. On this theory, the structure of authority can never be fixed into an institutional framework: it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels