Become What You Are

by Alan W. Watts

The Church, however, proves so often inadequate to cure the spiritual disease of modern man because he finds it impossible to believe its exclusive interpretation of those ancient symbols. For those who can believe, the Church is satisfactory, less on account of that interpretation than on account of the symbols themselves. Whatever we may read into them, they seem to retain a power in themselves which no amount of misunderstanding can destroy. Thus the fallacy of modern scepticism is that in rejecting the Church’s doctrines it has rejected the symbols as well, and so, if the expression is not too crude, has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. However, the reference to the baby is particularly apt, because what is perhaps the most important of these symbols is concerned with the baby, the Holy Child “conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary.” The attention of the Church has often been drawn to the inconvenient occurrence of this same story in other and older religions, as for instance in the legend of Maya and the Buddha, and of Isis and Horus. Whereupon the learned fathers have resorted to somewhat lame replies, calling upon that demon ex machina, the Devil, and suggesting that he put the story in other religions to confuse the faithful.