* what Jesus did was ensure defeat was not inevitable. which is something entirely different from ensuring victory. questionable morals in this life will become answerable in the next one the car is not self driving, it just won't be you driving it. etc etc. funnily enough, this is an old linguistic problem: automobile means self-mobile. if you make the mechanism invisible, people will believe anything about it. this is the problem of machines being available for everyone indiscriminately (as opposed to magic being wielded only by shamans, as in the past). we can find a similar degeneration in savage populations where magical practices when they are no longer reserved for those with discipline and knowledge of what they are, what they mean, and how they work. no fear and trembling associated with them anymore. such societies descend quickly to chaos and do not come back from it. don't get me started on initiation, you'd never hear the end of it. i haven't seen the northern lights, but i've seen the southern shadows. life on earth is the near death experience. few talk about this. when people talk about you behind your back you sneeze. a spiritual immune response. one thing i'm sure of: the new age will not be new agey christ means anointed. no wonder christianity is slippery. without christianity, the west will degenerate to such an extent as to not deserve the name. and vice versa. the problem with misplaced faith is that afterwards it's hard to find you can only have true compassion if you're compatible. it's the difference between having empathy and being pathetic. i would never take a master that would accept me as a pupil i am an admirer of confucian civilization (as of chinese thought in general) and would go so far as to consider it the highest form of social organization this side of the axial age (though it started in china much earlier than that). it is a beautiful ideal and at times was executed nearly perfectly, from what we can tell. this of course does not mean i believe it could be implemented everywhere or that it can be implemented now. Guenon believed until the end of his life that the spiritual quality of chinese civilization was so great that they alone would survive modernity. two years after his passing china had a communist revolution. a lesson. still, china remains alone in the impressive feat, throughout all revolutions and invasions and foreign cultural and religious imports and everything else, of retaining its own culture throughout and still today despite everything. JM Greer had a good thought experiment on this (that the chinese of the 17th century actually boasted of): imagine if ancient egyptian culture was still the culture of egypt today. this is the case with china, and it actually goes back further than the egyptian. while everyone was writing epics and songs the chinese were already recording detailed annals, that is, doing actual history - and having invented paper and the printing press, they actually went through the first recorded hyperinflation as well (nothing new under the sun). one reason for this longevity and continuity is that china, contrary to all other high civilizations, practiced a regenerative form of agriculture, so that they never had a collapse of ecosystems, which happened, and rather fast, in all other high civilizations (including in the 'new world'). still today the majority of organic and regenerative agricultural techniques has an origin in ancient china. you can say korean and japanese too, and it's true, but these are extensions of ancient chinese culture. great and interesting, and sometimes improving, extensions (not only in agriculture of course) but still derived from a chinese source. as an aside, i am still convinced that the far eastern peoples descend from a fourth son of Noah. it's either that or the lies go WAY deeper. i prefer to think otherwise, but sometimes i don't know. the caste system in india was not sufficient to prevent collapse from the poison of absolutist metaphysics. most refuse to learn the lesson and instead double down. admittedly, it is very humorous at times. but it's also frustrating for the same exact reasons. there's the near east and the middle east and the far east. and there's also the near west and the middle west and the far west. and it explains a lot yet everyone forgets.
*
Would it make sense to think of misplaced faith like misplaced glasses? Too often placed on top of your head where you can neither see it nor feel it? There's probably a quip in there about classical metaphysics too, something like 'I placed my faith above my head with my metaphysics, and thus out of sight, out of mind'