Two days ago marked the beginning of the festival of Diwali.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion people around the world:  a joyous occasion.  Diwali is known as the festival of lights, the lights of color, brilliance, enlightenment, and happiness:  all that which enters into the mystery and wonder of life and the gods who give it.

     It's apt.  Unless we celebrate life in the framework of higher purpose, its lights becomes little more than random occasions, capricious occurrences, chance coalescences of dust and plasma, things in which we have found (or according to German philosopher Martin Heidegger, have been "thrown") ourselves, raw and unknown, and told we must live.  And as the late evolutionary biologist William Provine acknowledged, if life is random, we are no more than plops, born only to die.  There is no meaning.  We're here, but why?
     Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for it.  And rejoice in the fact of purpose, the purpose of a creator.  Light doesn't shine long in a forgotten universe.