My friend Eric mentioned Douthat’s book “Bad Religion” which I had not finished, and then it got mentioned on the McKnight piece I stumbled upon prompting me to read the chapter.

Douthat here sums up the tenets of this faith (pg. 216). Below are some quotes and extrapolations on my part.

1. All organized religions offer only a partial glimpse of god, light being, etc. The truly spiritual person experiences god through feeling, intuition, experience, not reason or propositional statements. The direct encounter is authentic, statements about it derivative. “Trust your feelings Luke…” 
2. God is everywhere and in everything, but the surest avenue towards experience god is in your own self or soul. The soul of god is your own soul.
3. Because god is all encompassing, sin, death and evil are ultimately reconciled, not defeated. “Consciousness is universe” The only hell that exists does so in a terrified mind. In other words evil does not exist, it is just an illusion.
4. Beatitude is not only constantly available, but universally available. This means that heaven is there for the receiving at any moment, and in every moment, regardless of circumstance.

The entire chapter is excellent. Here are some quotes: 

Again, the advantages of this therapeutic culture should not be easily dismissed. Tolerance, freedom, personal choice— what Rieff calls the “kindly” aspects of the new spiritual order— can loom very large indeed, especially when set against the web of shame that the older Christian culture sometimes bound around believers and nonbelievers alike.

But it’s striking that the things that therapeutic, God Within religion doesn’t seem to have delivered to Americans are the very things that it claims to be best suited to provide— contentment, happiness, well-being, and, above all, the ability to forge successful relationships with fellow human beings.

Instead, the solipsism and narcissism that shadow God Within theology seem to be gradually overwhelming our ability to live in community with one another. Just as Christopher Lasch predicted, in a therapeutic culture “the cult of intimacy conceals a growing despair of finding it,” and “personal relations crumble under the emotional weight with which they are burdened.” 79 Americans are less happy in their marriages than they were thirty years ago; women’s self-reported happiness has dipped downward overall. Our social circles have constricted: declining rates of churchgoing have been accompanied by declining rates of just about every sort of social “joining,” and Americans seem to have fewer and fewer friends whom they genuinely trust. Our familial networks have shrunk as well. More children are raised by a single parent; fewer people marry or have children to begin with; and more and more old people live and die alone. A Duke University study found that Americans reported having an average of three people with whom they discussed important matters in 1985, but only two in 2004; the percentage with exactly zero confidants doubled, and the percentage who talked only to family members rose from 57 percent to about 80 percent. 80 We’re freer than we used to be, but also more isolated, lonelier, and more depressed.

Douthat, Ross (2012-04-17). Bad Religion (Kindle Locations 4805-4821). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

It isn’t surprising that people taught to be constantly enamored of their own godlike qualities would have difficulty forging relationships with ordinary human beings. (Two Supreme Selves do not necessarily a happy marriage make.) Learning to love ourselves and love the universe isn’t necessarily the best way to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves, it turns out, and an overemphasis on the essential unity of all things— the Creator and creation, God and man, Yahweh and Elizabeth Gilbert— may be a good way to dissolve more intermediate loyalties completely.

The result is a nation where gurus and therapists have filled the roles once occupied by spouses and friends, and where professional caregivers minister, like seraphim around the throne, to the needs of people taught from infancy to look inside themselves for God. Therapeutic religion promises contentment, but in many cases it seems to deliver a sort of isolation that’s at once comfortable and terrible— leaving us alone with the universe, alone with the God Within.

Douthat, Ross (2012-04-17). Bad Religion (Kindle Locations 4835-4843). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.