Interstellar Spaceships And Idols

Slower-than-light interstellar travel is not an easy matter.

In Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, the spaceship Astra has only just set out towards Alpha Centauri.

In Anderson's Orbit Unlimited, there are four parts:

at the end of part one, it has been decided that a dissident group will be exiled to an extra-solar planet, Rustum;

in part two, the group is in interstellar space and must decide whether to turn back;

in part three, they are in orbit around Rustum;

in part four, they are finally settling the surface of Rustum.

In later volumes, there are four more stories set on Rustum and a ninth set on a second extra-solar planet, Roland, in the same timeline.

A spaceman returns to Earth to find an idol where a church had been. To him, the idol is an abomination. To some of us, the church and the idol are alternative approaches to the eternal.

I read about a Hindu religious leader, name forgotten, who, as a child, was taken to a Shiva temple where he saw a mouse eating food offered to the deity. He thought, "This god cannot even protect his offering from a mouse," and became an iconoclast, like the Hebrew prophets, whereas the normative Hindu vision is of God in the idol, the food, the mouse and the congregation.

See:

"The Divine Is With Us"