No Child Left Behind

Paganism, before Constantine, had become overwrought, taken for granted and in many cases an obscenity. In the theater, the gods quarrelled with each other like so many modern day soap opera characters. Though pagan philosophers called for temperance and liberality, these same pagan philosophers chased young boys as romantic interests and winked at the upstart christians being slaughtered in the colosseum.

But if we take paganism at it's root, using Alexandria as a datum for example, we find Plotinus writing of the One and it's emanations, travelling back to Plato, writing of the world of forms that transcends the world of appearances, and further still back to Pythagoras who assigned number as essential and harmony as divine.

And it is to be noted that no sooner were the christian martyrs martyred, than the church set it's eyes on heretics and witches and in their turn turned the sacred into something unchristian.

The new order became steeped in the old barbarity.

But revisiting this pagan precursor that simply will not go away.

It's principles are found in our appreciation of nature, in our deep seated belief that there must be something more to experience than what our senses provide, and that the transcendent is useless unless it can be made concrete, everyday and practical.

When we leave our churches, we go to face the world.

And deep down, we know we have not been given all the answers and tools we need to explain the everday reality we each must face.

This is the child that will not be left behind.

That deeper, more primitive, first knowledge that try as we might, will not be domesticated, urbanized and categorized.

It falls outside the logical categories of theology and into that more nebulous realm of spirituality.