Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Lights in the darkness

Lights in the darkness

Last updated on: November 11, 2026 at 5:04 pm by Fred Clark

0 Comments

Lights in the darkness 2026-11-11T17:04:14-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

• “‘Indian Christmas:’ Hindus celebrate and mourn the commercialization of Diwali.” Trisha Mukherjee looks at what’s gained and what’s lost when big retailers take note of a religious holiday.

I’m a big fan of Diwali for three reasons. First, because it’s a winter festival of light, and those are pretty and joyous and inspiring. (“Well done, well done. We’re half-way out of the dark,” etc.) Secondly because I believe in robust religious pluralism — I think freedom requires it — and so I think America’s calendar should include all the holidays.

And third, selfishly, because we start getting Christmas [stuff] at the Big Box in late July and by late October my overheads are so crammed and swollen with all of that that I’m grateful and excited for any chance to finally pack some of it down and sell it every year weeks before Black Friday.

Our company is not one of the chains mentioned in Mukherjee’s article, even though Diwali is a big deal for many of our customers. Every year my store puts up hand-written signs with holiday greetings because Big Box Inc. still doesn’t have any official, professionally produced signage for Diwali under the company brand. Every year when I call up the chain to ask about that I get the same question — “What’s Diwali?” And then I give the same commercialized, capitalist-friendly answer: “It is, among other things, a way for you to sell a whole bunch of ‘Christmas’ lights a month before you’d otherwise start selling Christmas lights.”

It’s a really big company and before I started working there I would have guessed that somewhere at Big Box HQ there’d be files with the demographic data of every one of the chain’s thousands of locations. Such files would mean that our area’s large South Asian population would be included in the profile for our store, ensuring that we’d get store-branded “Happy Diwali” signage and maybe a larger supply of those cool shimmery curtain-lights that people seem to love for this holiday. But nope. Not yet anyway.

• Randy Woodley reflects on “Serving the Seventh Generation.” (Personal sidetone: Woodley was my RA at Eastern College back in the 1980s.)

I first heard the “Seventh Generation” principle via the organic/sustainable eco-products company of that name. I learned much more about it years later, during a religious conference at the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin. One speaker there (whose name, alas, I do not remember) explained an aspect of it I hadn’t previously considered — how some of its implications are almost Rawlsian.

Caring about the well-being of your children, he said, means caring about the well-being of your spouse. If you treat your spouse with neglect or disrespect, you are likely harming the future of your children. Now think about your grandchildren. They have four grandparents. The well-being of your grandchildren depends, in part, on the well-being of all four of those grandparents.

Your great-grandchildren will have eight great-grandparents. If you are a young parent, you only know two of those eight people — yourself and your spouse. Those other six people could turn out to be anyone.

Now think of the Seventh Generation — your great-great-great-great-great-grandchild. There are, right now, 127 other people walking around who will also be that child’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents and you have no way of knowing who those people are. And so you must be cautious and treat everyone with respect and fairness, because to do otherwise puts the future well-being of your very own great-great-great-great-great-grandchild at risk of generational harm.

Alas, the sort of person who needs to be persuaded not to be cruel or predatory to strangers because doing so might endanger their own descendants is also the sort of person who is unlikely to care much about the future happiness and well-being of those descendants either. So, like John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” thought experiment, this is wise, but no more compelling to fools than any other wisdom.

• Back in the spring, Kathryn Post had a good RNS piece on “Starseeds” — “What are starseeds? The alien subculture offering a conspiratorial spiritual escape.”

This is a very online, New Age-y phenomenon that, as Post says, is “taking on the trappings of religion” for many of its adherents:

Starseeds identify as galactic souls fighting a cosmic battle between good and evil, often by disclosing hidden truths via social media posts. The New Age phenomenon has been around for decades, but online interest skyrocketed during the pandemic, and content with #starseed has over a billion views on TikTok. Not quite an organized movement, starseeds are building their own mythologies — galactic histories, lore about alien species, conspiracies about reptilians — and online rituals that, for some, have taken on the trappings of religion. Instead of praying to saints, speaking in tongues or learning from priests, starseeds channel galactic beings, communicate in light language and follow starseed influencers online. Experts say most starseeds are harmless but warn the ideology can overlap with conspiracies that, in extreme cases, create risk.

Some of that is basically harmless hippy-dippy stuff — talk of “light” and cosmic love and good vibrations, etc. But it’s also a gospel of limited atonement and double predestination, and even goopy forms of such an ideology can get very dark. It’s one thing to think of yourself as a starseed infused with cosmic specialness and “high vibrations,” but the test is how that leads you to thinking of other people — those earth-born, earth-bound “low vibration” creatures who make up the vast majority of your neighbors. Is your cosmic specialness and chosenness something that obliges you to bring them — all of them — into the light of cosmic salvation? Or is their “low-vibration” inferiority understood as justification for their destruction and damnation?

Yes, this is gooey, goopy nonsense, but it still has enough of “the trappings of religion” that it has to make the choice every religion has to make between “that they may possess the remnant of Edom” and “that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord.”

Anyway, I was taken back to Post’s piece on the “starseeds” because I was schadenfreude surfing, post Election Day, reading reactions from the white-nationalist MAGA right to the blue wave transformation of Congress and state governments across America, and I came across this tweet from Michael Cernovich:

Cernovich is the “Pizzagate” guy. He’s a hard-core MAGA and Q-Anon white-nationalist and mass-deportation enthusiast who has backed Trump since day one. But now, after the election, he writes: “I don’t care about myself. Never especially enjoyed ‘life,’ as this place felt like a slave planet from my first moment of consciousness. I only remain here to serve my family and humanity. Trump is surrounded by subhumans. People with high vibration become repelled by him.”

That’s starseed language, and the darkest form of it. It’s not a cosmic message of light brought by the “high vibration” elect to uplift the rest of us earthbound mere mortals, but is, instead, an otherworldly rationalization for categorizing most humans as “subhumans” with no rights, dignity, or inherent worth.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

November 9, 2026

The possibility of possibility

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Sorry to hear about your knee. May you heal quickly."

Ellie Still in the Mix in 26

The possibility of possibility

"Thank you for that!!"

Ellie Still in the Mix in 26

The possibility of possibility

"No Tab Pete is just following the lead of his cowardly bosses."

Ellie Still in the Mix in 26

The possibility of possibility

"That's C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, isn't it?"

Tehanu

The possibility of possibility

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month November 2026 October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What does "Maranatha" mean?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Praise the Lord Come, Lord Jesus God is great The Lord is my rock