Alan Watts: “Ecology and Religion”

Alan Watts on the limited symbolic ideas about God affecting human behavior, the problem of the paternalistic concept of God, the feminine property in Eastern metaphysics, and the self-contradiction of the idea that real power is force. Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master’s degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.