Melkor; Evil by Will or Evil by Nature?

[Lord Gothmog]

You are right when you write that Tolkien disliked allegories, and I only meant it as a theory if Tolkien drwaed any comparison between Eru and God.
But you write, how can I know that God is good?
I cannot; That is the whole concept of belief.
I belive in it, because I have seen more evidence suggesting it than the opposite; But I cannot be sure until i die.

Your next statement is: How can Melkor be seduced if he is not at some point evil/dark from the beginning?
Again, we are at the point of belief and not fact. And although I know that Tolkien wanted to keep his books free from christian allegories, I still think that he thought upon Eru as a being of good, simply because that was the most obvious for Tolkien.

My arguments are not the best, but it is hard to come up with something better since we ae discussing something that is hypothetical and not facts.

The reason I answered as I did was because The vast majority of quotes by Tolkien that I am aware of state in one form or another that The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion are not and never were intended to have comparisons with Any religion. It was his intent to write these as a Pre-Christian Mythology for England. Therefore it is unwise to put in christian comparisons to a work that he has stated is not to be Christian.

The reason I asked 'How do you know that God is Good' was in hope of getting the very answer you gave. It is a matter of belief. This being the case, an author can also explore other ideas to get the same results in terms of how good and evil work in a world.

You are the one who is saying that Melkor was Evil in his begining, I said that he was Dark. This allowed him to find the path that lead to Evil. I also said that the Darkness came from Iluvatar. This does not mean that Iluvatar is evil only that he has both Light and Dark, if he did not have darkness in himself, how could he deal with Evil as he, like Manwe would not be able to comprehend it?

The one problem with using Tolkien's religion is that while we can know the teachings that he learned, we cannot know how Tolkien himself interpreted them, so we also cannot know what was the most obvious view for him to have for Eru. So we are left with our own interpretations of his writings.