[davem]

Originally Posted by Raynor

If, in the end, as I said previously, the evil of Melkor brings about good, it is only due to Eru, without whom it would not be possible. What Eru is talking about here is the final impotence of evil, or of any action set against Eru.

Rather like a doctor giving a gun to a man he knows will go out & shoot people, because he, the doctor, knows he will be able to fix up the victims & come out looking good as a result. Eru didn't have to allow Melkor into Arda at all. If he could be expelled at the end of the FA he could have been expelled before 'Ea!'

There is hardly any evidence that Melkor sought to improve creation, that is, at least in the final stages of his madness, when he would have likely turned all creation into the chaos you mentioned. And regardless of what one believes it is right, if it goes against the greater good, and if it endangers it, it cannot be possibly tolerated. This "anything goes" argument is simply incongruent with morality.

Who determines what the 'greater good' is? Melkor's desire to destroy Arda & reduce it to nothing is, to my mind, rather akin to Eru's wiping out of Numenor. Both Eru & Melkor's intention is to destroy what they don't like.

Does that imply that Melkor could be the most misunderstood hero? That our judgment is clouded by the tortures, corruptions and destructions he perpetrated and we can't objectively judge him from a moral point of view?

Of course we can judge him from a moral point of view. We should also judge Eru from a moral point of view, & hse the same standard, not resort to 'Eru is good & therefore whatever he does is good' arguments. One can't argue that mass killing by Melkor is bad, but mass killing by Eru is good because Melkor is bad & Eru is good. That's a circular argument. Either mass killing is bad whoever does it, or its acceptable.

I for one choose not to ignore Bilbo being meant to find the One Ring, Gandalf returning from beyond Creation with increased powers and Gollum falling. As you and I know from past debates, either in the works, or in the letters, these are implied/stated to be the works of Eru.

Bilbo was only 'meant to find the Ring' by Eru long after TH was written, when LotR became the cumination of the Legendarium. The only one who 'intended' Bilbo to find the ring originally was Tolkien. I doubt many readers of LotR in the pre-Sil days thought about 'divine' intervention in LotR - unless they were religious & chose to read that into it. Personally, I find the whole experience of reading TH & LotR better if I forget Eru & the Valar out of it. I also find it interesting that at Aragorn's coronation in the first edition there is no mention of the Valar: "Now come the days of the king. May they be blessed" is what Gandalf says , "while the thrones of the Valar endure" was added in the Second ed revision - & interestingly the mention is also missed out in the movie, where they, deliberately or not, use the original version. One can perhaps see this as a result of all the 'theological' speculation Tolkien was indulging in during the late fifties/early sixties.