This is a heavy and uncomfortable philosophical discussion.
For the true pagan, life is a tragedy, with oneself as the hero and the victim. Every injustice and every experience serves only to intensify the tragedy and the heroism of what seems like the the ultimate sacrifice, in which sex and ‘love’ and anger and hatred and jealousy and witchcraft and gossip and greed and the self forgetfulness of drugs and alcohol are all likewise an experience of immolation of the self, in which one finds a sort of horrid self-forgetfulness by wallowing in self-pity, self-love, self-pleasure, all the while incidentally taking advantage of others and treating them as instruments (rather than other people like oneself with agency and responsibility and souls that suffer, in other words, precious creations of God) – by the way, religion and meditation and visions and self-oriented spirituality and Nirvana and even goodness and quoting the Bible, if only done for the sake of the approval of others, can just as soon become self-wallowing carnal pleasures – but eventually for the pagan even self-hatred and self-loathing can become a kind of pleasure at times. Ultimately this lifestyle is in rebellion against God, and this is why the pagan holds God responsible for the lot he finds himself in, for whenever his sins catch up with him, he is inwardly angry at God and desires essentially for Christ to be crucified again, for Jesus Christ is God.
For one who has given his or her life to Christ, though, the whole experience of the soul is changed and transformed. Righteousness becomes a pleasure, goodness and truth and the Word of God become food to the soul. The injustices done to oneself by others instead of feeding the self-immolation, become opportunities for carrying the cross by not striking back or speaking out: every injustice and persecution becomes an opportunity to forgive and demonstrate the righteousness of Christ. It is not that the true Christian does not feel any of these slings and arrows (often slung at us by those who purport to love us) indeed, the true Christian feels every slight and insult in proportion to his closeness to Christ as much as Christ felt it, but the true Christian absorbs each and every insult and persecution as though he or she is Christ on the cross, in this world today, and such a person will be resurrected by God in the midst of these sufferings, with a strength and joy that cannot be denied. Such a person is filled with the light of Christ, who can take injustices and not hate, but only forgive and love in return, and is a kind of light in the world, just as Jesus is the light of the world: the person filled with light is a little Christ. Only the Holy Spirit can accomplish this change, the love of God, working in us.
The one on the pagan road is truly headed towards hell, and doesn't even know that he or she is serving Satan and bowing down to the world; at least, not consciously. But at certain times the pagan has some dim apprehension of it: to the one being lost when the true Christian enters his periphery it is a shock, a frightening sign of something completely ‘out of this world’, a sort of smelling salts, that both repels and has the power to wake someone up, but often is rejected, for “men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their deeds were evil.”
But by committing one’s life to Christ, one is essentially giving one’s life over to God to change it: Jesus takes the whole self and revolutionises it, so that the former sinner’s complete soul is changed in that he or she loves life and truth and the light and every kind of goodness. And for any Christian who is not yet at this point, Jesus uses life’s batterings and beatings and persecutions and unfair treatment and sufferings to accomplish this change, by giving ever more opportunities to love and forgive instead of hating and striking back. And it is the people who are not carrying their own crosses, often supposed Christians, whose lives haven’t changed, who are sometimes the worst persecutors of all.
The post-Christian pagans of today, though, are burdened with something worse than ever before (although this apostasy was already part of history, in the apostasy of the middle ages in parts of the Syrian and Arabian and Eastern church, since the 700s).
For in past times, in the Western World at least under Christendom: the restraining power of conscience, was always present in the past, telling people not to steal, not to commit adultery or blasphemy or fornication, not to lie or curse God or commit perjury, or even murder, but this is in the process of being surgically removed by the modern technocratic state and is being replaced by the voice of the propaganda machine and top-down media and government manipulation. Today, the consciences of those who follow the world are being replaced with the voice of the false laws of this present age of the world, saying things like this: “don’t misgender that person,” “it is better to lie about temperatures and exaggerate global warming because people won’t believe it’s an emergency unless they are motivated to do something by these exaggerations,” “abortion is a good thing to do, it is a shame to bring a child into the world unloved,” “you are responsible for the sufferings of x, y, z, because the white men did so and so so you must support positive racism/sexism/etc” “don’t rock the boat,” “take the vaccine,” “patriotism is evil”, “do this, do that,” “do whatever society coerces you to do,” “support the Ukraine war,” “recycle your plastic bags,” etc. Everyone knows what is virtuous in this world’s terms, for we are fed these lies every day, and these virtuous acts replace the commands of God, every single one of them, so that those who follow God’s commands suddenly seem alien and unnecessarily strict and strangely scarily righteous people to the pagans of today.
This tendency in the Western World will not stop: it will continue and worsen until they are telling us to worship only on Fridays and say a particular creed, which will not be the Christian creed, in the name of tolerance; unless enough of us can turn to Christ and pray and love and perhaps God will turn things around.
Or perhaps it cannot be turned around: perhaps this is a sign that Jesus will soon return. I do not know. I hope so.
Every one of us is a mixture of these tendencies, as Luther said, a donkey ridden sometimes by God and sometimes by the devil: but one has to ask, which direction am I myself headed in? If it is downwards, into the abyss of self-immolation, then it is time to change direction; it is time to cry out to Jesus, “Save me! Save me Lord Jesus! I give my life to you! Please take my life and change me!” before it is too late.