Maybe I am a prophet. I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Muhammad, Buddha and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies.
If you want to go out for a hunting trip and shoot cans with your son and a .22, that's fine. Do I need an AK-47 with a 100-round magazine if I'm going on a hunting trip? No. It is, to borrow a phrase from Confucius, like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.
To Confucius, harmony was consensus, not conformity. It required loyal opposition.
Confucius - or Kongzi, which means Master Kong - was not born to power, but his idiosyncrasies and ideas made him the Zelig of the Chinese classics.
In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.
Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.
I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.
Particularly since the computerization of the world, the impact of media has grown enormously. The printed books and the printed media have become less important. Why should somebody read Laozi or Confucius if he can Google?
Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic.
Why don't the names of Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius offend people? The reason is that these others didn't claim to be God, but Jesus did.
