THE STAR
Clarke’s story places the human race in an intergalactic context that suggests that the planet Earth and its inhabitants may not be all that important in the cosmic scheme of things.
Religion, and in particular religious faith, are central themes in “The Star.”
The narrative is the interior monologue of the central character, a Jesuit astrophysicist. He is aboard a star ship on a mission to investigate the causes of a supernova in a distant galaxy. He and the rest of the crew discover the artefacts of a highly developed civilization, carefully preserved on the only planet that remains in orbit around the supernova
— the explosion of a star, during which it burns with an intensity and a luminosity that may be a billion times that of the Earth’s sun. Following such an explosion, a star becomes a white dwarf, a body of very dense matter.
Knowing that all life would be wiped out when their sun flared into a supernova, this race of sentient beings left a record of who they were and what they accomplished. The pictures, sculptures, music, and other relics of a very humanlike race doomed to destruction depress the crew and investigating scientists, who are far from their own homes and lonely. What the narrator has learned but not yet communicated to the others is that the supernova that destroyed this civilization was the Star of Bethlehem, which burned brightly in the sky to herald the birth of Jesus Christ. His discovery has caused him to re-examine and to question his own faith.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you read. o The main character in this story is a Jesuit monk, a member of the Society of Jesus (a Catholic religious order founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1534). o Jesuits devote their lives to missionary and educational work and are also known as the intellectuals of the church. o The story makes a reference to a painting by Paul Rubens (1577-1640), a Flemish artist who painted a well-known picture of Loyola. o The story mentions two Latin phrases. The first, AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIUM, means "For the greater glory of God." The second is the Exercitia Spiritualia, which means "Spiritual Exercises," a book written by Loyola, which the Jesuits use for guidance.

Everything that happens in this story--the actions and words of the characters, the setting, the slow-but-sure progress to the surprise ending--points to a central idea which is a statement about the relationship we each have to God; it's a concern that is as old as human nature itself.

I think that's the thing that challenged his faith; not (as he said) the "death of cultures" -- without a doubt bad things happen as the Universe unfolds according to its laws.

No, the point isn't that he lost his faith, it was the opposite. The timing of the explosion forced him to intellectually confront a choice between a truly impersonal Universe where ironic accidents happen but are not malicious and a Universe where God would burn up an entire world deliberately just to make a point somewhere else. After all, there were ten million suns that might have served just as well, many of them without life forms.

So the moral choice is: is it better to believe in an Evil God, one that that hides a message of pure malice within what was supposed to be a sublime gift of love and peace and leaves it out there where we could not help but discover it, or to believe that the Universe is impersonal, that Christianity is an ironic accident, but that at the very least the fundamental order of all things is not wicked.

Using the imaginative world of “what if” to explore ethical issues.

Clarke lived in Sri Lanka and was clearly profoundly influenced over the years by the same rich religious culture I experienced as well. Hinduism and Buddhism do not view God the same way we do in the west. In either of these cultures the irony of a burnt offering (even one of this magnitude) would not have the same effect -- it would be a Zen lesson, a slap upside the head. It would even have a certain macabre humour to it, drawing one's attention to the Now and the need for compassion in the face of a world that is relentless real, and really irrelevant.

It seems that Clarke is interested in the thought experiment: “What if God intentionally destroyed a civilization to give a sign to another of his ostensibly universal redemption plan?” One shouldn’t lose sight of the fact, however, that Clarke, whatever his intentions were when he wrote the story, provides a sympathetic account of the faithful confronted with troubling facts about their own beliefs–something many can relate to on some level regardless of religious disposition.
Having this discovered by a Jesuit is an important part of what turns this from being a neat idea into a story because it turns the discovery into something personal. It’s an advanced civilisation. That, too, is important, because it links the story to one of the oldest and most intractable of theological problems: if God sacrificed his only son for the salvation of humankind, are any inhabitants of another world inherently beyond salvation.
As a good Jesuit, our hero has to believe that the people of the destroyed world were not saved, and indeed were not worthy of salvation, because they could never have known Jesus Christ.
As a human being, he sees the aftermath and has to ask if God is good. This theological conundrum has been around since the early 17th century, but I know of no story that encapsulates it as neatly and as powerfully as ‘The Star’.