Tom Harpur - Born Again: My Journey from Fundamentalism to Freedom

Born Again

ALSO BY TOM HARPUR

Harpurs Heaven and Hell

Always on Sunday

For Christs Sake

Life After Death

God Help Us

The Uncommon Touch

Would You Believe?

Prayer: The Hidden Fire

Finding the Still Point

The Pagan Christ

The Spirituality of Wine

Living Waters

Water into Wine

TOM HARPUR

BORN
AGAIN

My Journey From
Fundamentalism
to Freedom

Thomas Allen Publishers
Toronto

Copyright 2011 Tom Harpur

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systemswithout the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Harpur, Tom
Born again : my journey from fundamentalism to freedom / Tom Harpur.

ISBN 978-0-88762-738-5

1. Harpur, Tom. 2. Harpur, TomReligion.
3. Spiritual biography. 4. Newspaper editorsCanada
Biography. 5. JournalistsCanadaBiography. I. Title.

PN4913.H36A3 2011 070.92 C2010-907344-4

Editor: Patrick Crean
Jacket and text design: Gordon Robertson
Jacket image: Andy & Michelle Kerry / Trevillion Images

Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,
a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,
390 Steelcase Road East,
Markham, Ontario L3R 1G2 Canada

www.thomasallen.ca

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of
The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11

Printed and bound in Canada by Transcontinental Printing.
Text Printed on a 100% PCW recycled stock.

For Susan
She always will know why

But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of lifes morningfor what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

C.G. JUNG, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Contents

Wanderlust

The wanderlust is calling, is calling, is calling,
the wanderlust is calling
from lands across the sea;
the wanderlust is calling
and I know its calling me.

From Inca ruins in Peru
all wrapped in silent wonder;
from castle walls whose towers once knew
the roar of cannon thunder;
there comes a small voice beckoning me
in clear persistent tones,
to seek adventure and romance in
new terrestrial zones.

The wanderlust is calling, is calling, is calling,
the wanderlust is calling
and the tide is on the race.
Ill port my helm, unfurl my sails,
and paths of heroes trace.

Written by Tom Harpur, aged sixteen,
for the 1945 edition of the Malvern High
School yearbook, The Malvern Muse

1
SURPRISED
BY GOD

M ANY READERS of this book will be aware that in the spring of 2004, just before Easter and within days of my seventy-fifth birthday, my world was rocked by the publication of The Pagan Christ. I was thrown suddenly into the centre of a whirling vortex of controversy, praise, criticism and media attention such as I had never experienced before. Already a bestseller even before its official pub date, the book remained at the top of several Canadian bestseller lists for many months, and the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail later judged it to be the number-one bestseller of the year. The book and its author were attacked with vitriol by conservative critics in all camps, while emails of gratitude and congratulation began to flow in by the hundreds from an ever-widening circle of avid readers whose primary emotions seemed those of joy at release from old, religion-induced fears and of renewed spiritual energy at now being freed to get on with a rational trust in God. My publisher and chief editor, forty-year publishing veteran Patrick Crean at Thomas Allen Publishers, said publicly that The Pagan Christ is the most radical and important book I have ever worked on. We could scarcely keep up with media requests for interviews, while simultaneously several TV producers were vying for the film rights. Eventually, CBC and an independent producer, David Brady Productions, won out. There was also a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war for foreign rights. The book went on to sell in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and in translation in France, Holland, Germany, Japan and Brazil.

Put in its simplest form, the message of The Pagan Christ is that the Christian story, taken literally as it has been for centuries, is a misunderstanding of astounding proportions. Sublime myth has been wrongly understood as history, and centuries of book burnings, persecutions and other horrors too great to be numbered were the result. The light crying out to be rediscovered is that every human being born into the world has the seed or spark of the Divine within; its what we do with that reality that matters. Building upon the work of earlier scholars, I set out my reasons for being unable to accept the flimsy putative evidence for Jesuss historicity. In its stead I made the case for the IsisOsirisHorus myth of ancient Egypt as the prototype of a much later Jewish version of the same narrative. The media jumped on that as their leading theme. The message of my follow-up book Water into Wine leads on from there. Its thesis is that the old old story is indeed the oldest story in human history, and it focuses upon us. The story of the Christ is the story of every man, woman and child on the face of the earth. The miracles, rather than being snipped out of the text with scissors la Thomas Jefferson (who did it to solve the problem of their otherwise seeming to contradict the very laws of physics said to be Gods own creation), are shown to be allegories of the power of the divine within us all. Read as historical, they border on the ludicrous. Read as allegory and metaphor, they shine with contemporary potency for ones daily life.

Obviously, for a theologian who had become a freelance journalist with the express objective of reaching the greatest possible number of people with a genuine message of faith and hope in terms they could readily comprehend, it was an exciting, even thrilling moment in which to be alive. Everything before that took on the aura of a guided preparation for this peak adventure. But it was a very stressful time as well. I had challenged traditional religious doctrines and taboos in a wholly radical way and the guardians of orthodoxy were not about to take that without a fight. While there were many clergy of all denominations among the enthusiastic readers of