Faith & Spirit Quote by Alan Watts

Watts slips a quiet blade into the polite fabric of midcentury Western certainty: the problem is not that people have become too sinful for God, but that the inherited concept of God no longer passes the plausibility test. “Old-fashioned” does a lot of work here. It isn’t an insult so much as a diagnosis: a picture of God as an external monarch, cosmic manager, and moral policeman has been yoked to premodern cosmology and social hierarchy. Put that image in the modern world of Darwin, Freud, astrophysics, bureaucratic states, and mass media, and it starts to read less like revelation than like outdated governance.

The key word is “difficulty.” Watts isn’t celebrating disbelief as a badge of sophistication. He’s naming a cultural bind: many people still hunger for meaning, consolation, and moral orientation, yet the traditional metaphysics that used to supply those goods now feels like a story we can’t sincerely inhabit. The subtext is psychological as much as philosophical: modernity has made belief feel like a performance, and the strain of pretending creates its own kind of anxiety.

Context matters. Watts, a bridge figure bringing Zen and Hindu ideas to Western audiences, is implicitly clearing the ground for a reframing of “God” away from a supernatural person and toward something more like experience, consciousness, or the unity of reality. He’s also poking at institutional religion’s branding problem: when the product is packaged as literal fact, it competes with science on science’s turf - and loses. Watts’ move is to shift the question from “Can you accept this proposition?” to “What does the symbol point to?”