Escaping Sin

What does one make of the sudden flood of Neo-paganism that has seized the Western World and particularly the Anglosphere?

Sin.

The perpetual mission of mankind is to deal with the effects of sin. Or, in other words, the 'problem of evil'. Without recourse to Christ, the creator, who is the source of the resolution of the existential disjunct between experience and real desire, the pagan route is ultimately and ironically thanophilic. A retreat into the cul-de-sac of perdition.

Christians are often told that the 'problem of evil' is particularly our problem. But it is not; it is a universal problem and is revealed as such by every visit to the doctor or dentist, every phone call to avert loneliness and every move to seek companionship, comfort and peace from the moment of birth.

Writ large, it is in every pagan maneuver to adjust to the deeply etched discontents of life.

In the case of paganism in its various forms, it has a number of strategies. These range from removal to an imaginary world and denying the problem; to disregard of it by embracing it in paganism's many forms: thus, seeking to succor the effects of sin, of evil's mark, by falling in line with it in varieties of active monism; seeing the self as absorbed in the continuity of reality without being distinct from it and pretending that this resolves the great disjunct between who we are and who we are made to be.

The two avenues out of the sin-trap are via Christ, who deals with the separation from God without erasing our 'imageness'; and paganism, which has to deny that imageness to achieve its prescription.