It’s time to listen to the prophets

Today, Christians all over the world celebrate the birth of their prophet. We’re not sure of the date of Jesus’s birth or even whether he definitely existed – but that’s not the important point. The important point is his message of anti-imperialism and love. Tolstoy distilled the gospels to Jesus’s message of love. ‘True life is life in the present, common to all men and manifesting itself in love.’ Competition is not love, and neither is hierarchy, empire or war – which inevitably follow from a society based on competition. Most of us are compassionate. Love comes easily and injustice make us angry.

Before Jesus, the Buddha taught us to renounce worldly things and to seek enlightenment. Renouncing worldly things is not consistent with materialism and perpetual growth, and the quest for enlightenment requires the intelligence to see this.

Before the Buddha, Lao Tzu taught us of the Tao, the balance and harmony of all things. ‘There is no misfortune greater than being covetous; hence in being content, one will always have enough’ and ‘that which goes against the Tao will come to an early end’. To live in harmony with nature is essential if we want to avoid coming to an early end, and it requires the integrity to curb our own covetousness.

Before Lao Tzu, Zoroaster and the unknown prophets of Hinduism and Judaism told us of the oneness of the divine – a unity that the cutting edge of science is only now reiterating via the pulses of quark energy that comprise every sub-atomic particle, and the infinitesimally small period of time after the Big Bang when nothing existed except the energy that everything is ultimately made of.

After Jesus, Mohamed reminded us that we are from the oneness and that we will return to it – we have no choice. We must submit. We can’t fight nature, the oneness, the divine – that will only cause us harm. We are all going back. If you don’t realise it now, you will realise it at the moment of death.

There is no need for more prophets. Guru Nanak was a freedom fighter and a great man – an exemplar rather than a prophet; and a cursory reading of the works of L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith and the Reverend Moon, amongst others, is enough to show that they were false prophets.

Harmony, enlightenment, love and submission are all we need to let go of the ego and reunite with the oneness. The combination of compassion, integrity and intelligence to allow us to do that is the basis of wisdom and the antithesis of capitalism.

It’s time to plant and nurture the seeds of a new system.