Great posts all - too much to take in.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by davem
Yet, if Middle-earth was this world in ancient times, & if, as Tolkien believed, Christianity is True, why would such things not be present in some form in Middle-earth? What I'm getting at is, the forms, the 'outward signs' of Religion certainly do not belong in Faerie (or in the historical period before they came into being) but the 'facts' those forms & emblems refer to, if they are True must exist there, if Faerie itself is at all True.
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One way to 'fit' the ME history with our own plus stay consistent with Christianity, one can set the Fourth Age in BCE then assume that the ME history has been blurred a bit during repeated transcriptions. As assumedly the events in ME did not happen in the Middle East (but in Europe?), then Biblical references to the crowning of Aragorn, Gondor, Elves etc can be easily be accounted for as these weren't part of the 'world' at that time. For example, does the Bible refer to events in China?
And reading the various posts made me see a similarity between the ME and Christian Bible history. In each, one goes from an ancient time of worldy Paradise to a more modern age where miracles (meaning what
we would consider to be miracles) are less common, human lives are shortened and intervention by the Divine is more subtle if existent. Knowledge, meaning the kind that would seem divine in nature, is also decreasing - one does not see anyone building Orthanc or making Palantiri in the Third Age.
Evil too is in a slide, becoming more human in form as time passes.
I would say, from a naturalistic pov, that the reverse has taken place in our reality/world. Surely there were golden ages in the past, but we now live longer, have more technology and knowledge (but not wisdom
). One thing is the same though; the intervention of the Divine is less apparent than in the past.
And a few post scripts:
Males are XY and females are XX (with a few exceptions, of course). I'm a skeptic (it's my religion). And I believe in genetic predisposition, not genetic predeterminism, meaning that most things aren't 'on/off' but are a spectrum ( a 'normal' bell curve) where one can have a greater or lesser predisposition to a trait.