[davem]

Originally Posted by Raynor

I believe that there are much more issues at play; for one, the morality of an act of God cannot be judged, unless we have his knowledge, which we don't. Then, if one is to judge the fact itself that he killed one or many persons, then I believe one is actually questioning his very right to end life at all. Then death itself would appear as a curse (be it "natural" or not, I might add); but this specifically stated to be a distortion of truth, a lie perpetrated by the Enemy.

Then you're arguing that there is no objective standard of right & wrong in M-e & we simply have to judge whatever Eru does as being right (& therefore 'Good') simply because he does it. By extension we also have to accept that Eru himself is 'Good' simply because he says he is. 'Good' & 'Evil' then become meaningless terms & we end up with a situation where 'A' is good because Eru does it & 'B' is bad because Morgoth does it - ie 'A' is judged to be a good act & 'B' an evil act because of who does it, not because they comply with or go against an objective standard of good & evil by which all acts are judged.

That Tolkien changed TH has well within his right, and we couldn't reasonably expect those who read only the early edition to have the same information.

But he didn't 'change' TH - he simply imposed a new interpretation on the existing text. And, strictly speaking, Bilbo did not 'find' the Ring - he stole it (& it doesn't matter that Smeagol also stole it - two wrongs don't make a right - Bilbo didn't know the Ring didn't belong to Gollum at that point, & when he realised the ring was Gollum's he still kept it.

The point being. Tolkien didn't write TH as part of the Legendarium. He wrote it as a stand alone story & Eru played no part in it in Tolkien's original intention, & he certainly did not 'intend' Bilbo to find it (particularly as at that time it wasn't The Ring). Early readers did not 'have that information' because neither did Tolkien. Even if they had had access to the Silmarillion as it then was they still wouldn't have known that Eru 'meant' Bilbo to find the ring, because Tolkien had not begun the sequel to TH which would eventually require Eru to 'mean' that. And even in LotR Tolkien (via Gandalf) is very careful to leave the nature & source of such 'meaning' ambiguous. One can, in the light of the Sil, read it as Eru. One could also read it in the light of Wyrd:

In its wider sense, wyrd refers to how past actions continually affect and condition the future. It also stresses the interconnected nature of all actions, and how they influence each other. The concept has some relation to the ideal of predestination. Unlike predestination, however, the concept of wyrd allows for human agency, constrained by past events, but nevertheless capable of shaping reality, an idea that is also prominent in the Dharmic concept of karma. Wyrd is "inexorable"[1] and "goes as she shall"[2], the fate (Norse ørlǫg) woven by the Norns. Indeed, the term's Norse cognate urðr, besides meaning "fate", is the name of one of the Norns, closely related to the concept of necessity (skuld). The name of the younger sister, Verðandi, is strictly the present participle of the verb cognate to weorþan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd

& leave Eru & the Valar out of the picture altogether......