The Star – Arthur C. Clarke (1967) [pdf]

This story was first published in 1955 and was collected in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Sky

The story was reprinted in the author's own collection of his favourite work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God_...

https://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/WRIT510/readings/The%20...

> While Clarke's story ended with the priest in despair after the revelation that the alien civilization had perished in order to light "the Christmas star," the TV episode added an epitaph by the aliens, revealing their acceptance of their place in the universe. Brennert later commented that "Over the years I've taken a little bit of heat from certain fans in the science fiction community for changing the ending of this story. I actually maintain that the ending as it is in this episode is implicit in the story and is not really at odds with the kind of metaphysical work that Clarke did in Childhood's End."[1]

I think a better way to end it would have been for Dr. Chandler or one of the other non-believers, moved by the scale of the event, to have a change of heart about religion. Perhaps not all the way. Perhaps he comes to the protagonist on the observation deck, his face now uncertain, and with difficulty asks what made the protagonist start to believe. The protag is faced with trying to console this man plainly in need of spiritual support -- perhaps while at the same time feeling his own religious conviction slip away.

The Star – Arthur C. Clarke (1967) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680799 - Dec 2021 (44 comments)

The mechanism for non-super novas is very interesting: a white dwarf in a binary star system steals hydrogen from the other star, then heats it until it starts to fuse, which blows it all off into space!

Then, and now, I thought an interesting retelling could involve the protagonists discovering a civilization (Type II+) that had learned to tap the energy of their star and (eventually) inadvertently triggered a supernova, though that fate took some time to unfold and so various laments were left behind on their planet's surface.

Upon realization of the above, the principal protagonist (Jesuit priest) recollects about his crews' wonderment that one civilization's end could, across light years, so precisely signal monumental changes in another. Unanswered questions are raised as to Redemption and Doom. The story ends with the principal protagonist having made a 30-year Ignatian retreat and marveling that, among all the myriad unanswered questions, Earth wheat and grapes were immediately cultivable in the alien soil, such that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was able to be offered uninterruptedly from the day they arrived to the present.

Enjoy and happy holidays!

https://filebin.net/8nvuikvpbf64o5ec

Christus natus est

O Χριστός γεννιέται

Христос раждается

המשיח נולד

ابن الله يولد اليوم

Sobering words indeed

If an omnipotent God could arrange such an explosion, and we presume Him loving of all sentient creatures, He could easily arrange His explosion to avoid harming His creatures. Such a story wouldn't happen in the first place.

But what if He did? Anyone reading the Bible -- as certainly a Jesuit would have -- knows there is no theological requirement in Christianity that God value a life as humans value a life. "My ways are not your ways, says the Lord." St Paul is explicit that the notion that Pharaoh was created entirely for the demonstration of God's power by Moses does not contradict the justice of God. (Nor does he say Pharaoh was created for that purpose; he doesn't know, and treats the possibility as a hypothetical.)

Nor need the civilization's members be created simply for some demonstration. Perhaps they suffered the judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps the nova was the End Of The World for _that_ civilization, a component of its Second Coming, just as (Christians believe) our world will eventually experience. Genesis, Exodus, Paul, Revelations each provide precedents for such an apparent catastrophe. The priest can easily imagine any number of explanations consistent with his faith. (Indeed one might be the light of one world's closure illuminating the opening of another, reminiscent of the Greek's beacon signaling the fall of Troy in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon".)

Whether we look at the story from God's end or the priest's, it doesn't make any sense.

The reader doesn't need to _like_ any of those possibilities. The point is that the values by which we like or don't like anything are not necessarily the same as those of God. C.S. Lewis imagines a devil overseeing temptation during WW II saying "I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already. Please keep your mind on your work." ("The Screwtape Letters".) For Lewis, death doesn't mean the same thing to God as it does to us.

Still more, the Christian thinks the perspective by which we judge doesn't know all that He does. Many very clever people have pointed out that a super-intelligence will think differently than we do. Boethius argued (in the sixth century) that God's different experience of Time can explain the apparent contradictions of omniscience and free will. That lightweight Godel argued out that what is logically contradictory for us, trapped in sequential thought, can be resolvable by an infinite knowledge that is beyond sequence. More recently (and casually) Vernor Vinge posits (in "A Fire Upon The Deep") that the study of super artificial intelligences will be classified as "theology".

And the reader doesn't even have to buy any of that. That's what tolerance is about, we're all free to form our opinions and arguments as we think best.

But it is just ignorant to, well, ignore those opinions and arguments that we don't agree with.

And it is remarkable how many supposedly intelligent, curious and tolerant people become so ignorant of what careful and intelligent people have thought when the topic is theology.

I don’t think there was a star in Bethelem at all, most of the Bible is metaphorical, and a story of the of a culture, society, and religion.

The Bible cannot be interpreted as a historical book, but a faith one.