Paganism is really interesting, I think. I mean, its history as a word that swells with meaning down through the ages, to this very day, this moment...
I like to imagine Rome in its early attempts to install Christianity in Britain...armies, officials, etc....not doing too badly in the urban sectors, but the rural areas remaining largely unconverted, the country folk, the pagans(Lat.), still maintaining their rich, ancestral spiritual traditions and anchors in spite of the invasion and the attempts to subdue and reform their souls, remaining "uncivilized."
Today, for the most part, the popular notion of the pagan is of a godless person and yet I think a good case can be made that Jesus may have had more affinity with the pagan than with the dogmatist who later tinkered around with his teachings and invented something foreign to them.
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