Some things I like about the pagans

The Spirit can communicate with pagan individuals not filtered through the central Church authority. Revelations aren't abandoned or closed (see Gus Dizerega). Perhaps this freedom to interpret was related somehow to the freedom and distance between northern pagans, even though the religious rituals were much the same. This independence seems to have carried over to the Protestant Reformation. Authority and secrecy in both the pagan and monotheistic religions seems not so much to do with “secrecy” as it is levels of knowledge which naturally separate those who understand from those still learning.

The Gods are part of this world for the pagans, and so evil and suffering is part of the world of the Gods, the divine is not required to be washed clean of all suffering and evil, or of all life, which has caused so much explanation, interpretation, and splitting of hairs in the monotheistic religions. The pagan view is not optimistic or pessimistic, it is both, or it is more stoic.

In looking at the Great Mystery of cosmogony the pagans don't seem to see the world as previously perfect, no Fall takes place, no Fall seems necessary unless you think the simplest unicellular androgynous life is perfect. The world issues from the Primal Material, activated from within by the Spirit, and then the world evolves to the complex world we know, with all its joys and sorrows. There seems to be no more proof from religious revelations or from science of a one time beginning to the world than there is proof of an endless world with no beginning. The new revelation is that we evolve toward perfection, toward Godhood, we don't seem to derive from perfection.