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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
It would help us to be aware of a distinction between modern paganism and pre-Christian paganism. The modern variety has at its beck and call all the resources (of thought, technology, etc.) of the modern world, whereas the pre-Christian had only the culture and traditions thereof within each local people group. The pre-Christian is documented as having been quite pessimistic, despite the Balderic resurrection.
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Depends where you get your sources from really. The Romans of course liked to depict the British Celts as a brutish race and their scribes reserved particular hatred for the druids, seeing them as animals compared to their own sophisticated Gods. Yet archaeological and mythological evidence bears out that the Celts were possibly more sophisticated than the Romans in many ways - not least in the higher status of women, who had no status in Roman society. The druids were certainly not animals as they were depicted! Of course then the monks came along and they too had to make the old religions seem dangerous and unattractive. Some things could be absorbed whereas others had to be discredited - that's not just something that happens when new religions come along, but also when one nation conquers another. It's about power, and somehow inevitable.
Even going further back, the incredible amount of megalithic remains that litter the British Isles betrays that there was a highly advanced society with awareness of geometry and astronomy way before the Greeks, maybe even ways to predict eclipses. It doesn't suggest a pessimistic outlook to have societies which could spare the time and resources to build such monuments - it would have been the ancients' equivalent of having a Humber Bridge or Hoover Dam in every village.
And that's just in my own back yard. We've not even looked at other ancient 'pagan' faiths including some biggies such as Zoroastrianism, Shinto or Buddhism.