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.