The Death of the Mythic God by Jim Marion

Jim Marion is the founder and Director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness in Washington, D.C. and one of the founding members of Ken Wilber’s Institute for Integral Spirituality. He is also a public policy lawyer and his book The Death of the Mythic God; The Rise of Evolutionary Spirituality ties levels of spiritual consciousness to contemporary world politics.

The thesis of this book is that people are evolving in spiritual consciousness both individually and within the human race as a whole. They are moving away from the old concept of God as a being who created everything but who is separate and distinct from his creation. They are moving toward a concept of God as the underlying consciousness (Source, Force, Energy, Whatever) of which the Universe and everything in it is made. It's all God.

Marion, who once studied to become a Catholic priest, has great respect for Christianity and all other religions. However, he believes that Christianity strayed from the teachings of Jesus as the early church grew in size and began to hammer out its formal beliefs. "Jesus taught that we are responsible for our own sins and our own salvation. It is not his responsibility but ours. Jesus did not die to save us from sin. That was a theological interpretation added later by others, and one that directly contradicts what Jesus himself taught." (p. 59)

This is a terrific book -- and short (167 pages). I read it in a couple of evenings.

The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder

In The Hidden Face of God Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder pulls together quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and Bible study to conclude that mind, as exhibited by the ability to make choices, is inherent in every atom of the Universe.

The book shows the place where physics and metaphysics meet and greet (if not merge). In Schroeder's thesis the basic stuff of the Universe is information: "But when we look below the surface, we discover a world made of a mix of identical particles that are actually waves and then realize that the waves are massless expressions of information. Physics has exposed the metaphysical basis of existence." (p. 173)

Schroeder stops short of saying that the Creator and the Created are one thing, but he does seem to support the basic underlying unity of everything in the Universe -- call it God or a force or what-have-you.

One thing that I didn't like was the author's tendency to gush over how wonderfully complex the human body and brain are. To me this is anthropocentric thinking -- he assumes that human beings are smart enough to assess the complexities of reality. I can't help wondering if the perceived complexity is just a reflection of the limitations of our little animal brains.