[davem]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Mithras is setting a condition for salvation, essentially salvation by works. Jesus is not; he is offering himself as a gift to be received without condition other than acceptance of said gift.

Ok, now that's cleared up we can move on to Angels & pins....

Legolas errs, I think, in labeling intelligence as the cause of the Fall. The cause of the Fall was pride. Seeking forbidden knowledge in despite of the command was merely the particular act that was emblematic of the root of sin which was pride.

Well, telling a couple of innocent 'children' not to touch the big expensive vase on the mantlepiece & then going away & leaving them in the room with it is asking for trouble. Any parent knows exactly what their kids wold do in that instance, because kids are curious & always want to know 'what will happen if they do 'x'. The very intelligence they needed in order not to behave like children had been denied them, & the only way they could attain that level of intelligence was by doing the very thing they had been told not to do. Catch 22 or what?

]There's plenty of evidence for it. .... part of which you would call reading the myths backwards, but what I call reading them in the context of the Old and New Testaments. It doesn't matter if the myths predated the writing of these texts by millenia, because their author created the humans who subcreated the myths.

Sorry, but 'reading the myths backwards' is not 'evidence' - its just something you can do if you want. I can put on red tinted glasses & see everything coloured red, but that in no way constitutes 'evidence' that everything is red.

You haven't proven this assertion, and cannot.

It is certainly a work by a Christian, but there is nothing in the work which requires a knowledge of, or belief in, Christianity to make it understandable. To claim its a Christian work just because a Christian wrote it is equivalent to claiming that if a Christian kicks an old Coke can down the street its a Christian act because a Christian did it.

That depends upon whether one accepts Jesus' words that he is the resurrection and the life, that no one comes to the Father but by him. If he is speaking the truth with these words, than there must have been something from which we need saving. And Jesus was most certainly part of the Primary world.

Lot of qualifications there...

Wisdom and intelligence are most certainly not the same thing.

Of course they aren't - they're spelled differently for one thing....


Finally, in support of Alatar's point on the Fall I can only quote Tolkien's words:

I suppose a difference between this and what may be perhaps called Christian mythology is this. In the latter, the Fall of Man is subsequent to and a consequence (though not a necessary consequence) of the ‘Fall of the Angels’; a rebellion of created free will at a higher level than Man, but it is not clearly held (and in many versions not held at all) that this affected the ‘World’ in its nature: evil was brought in from outside, by Satan. In this [i.e. Tolkien’s own] Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the world (Ea); and Ea has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken. The Fall, or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable. (Letters 286-87)

Flieger has commented:

Tolkien borrowed from the myths of northwestern Europe for the flavor of his stories, and much has been written about his debt to existing mythologies from Scandinavia to Sumer. Nevertheless, he wrote to father Robert Murray that The Lord of the Ringswas “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” (Letters 172), and one might assume the legendarium as a whole would contradict that. Rather surprisingly, a quick comparison between the two reveals some fundamental differences, and not just on the level of doctrine or creed. Tolkien’s is a far darker world than that envisioned by Christianity, and falls short of the promise and the hope that the older story holds out. Unlike the Judaeo-Christian mythos with which it is so often compared, and which tells of a world fallen through human willfulness and saved by sacrifice, Tolkien’s mythos as a whole begins with a fall long before humanity comes on the scene. Thus original sin (if one may borrow that term) enters the world in the very process of its coming to be, when the melodic theme that is the metaphor for creation is distorted by the clamorous and discordant counter-theme of the rebel demiurge Melkor. The resultant Music sets the tone for all that is to follow. The supreme godhead, Eru/Il uvatar, who both proposes the theme and conducts the Music, is neither the Judaic God of Hosts who alternately punishes and rewards his people, nor the traditional Christian God of love and forgiveness. Rather, he is a curiously remote and for the most part inactive figure, uninvolved, with the exception of one cataclysmic moment, in the world he has conceived. The lesser demiurgic powers, the Valar, have only partial comprehension of the world they have helped to make. The primary heroes, the Elves, are gifted beings caught in a web of pride, power, and deceit—largely of their own weaving—that hampers and constrains every effort they make to get free of it. The secondary heroes, Men, are courageous but shortsighted blunderers with but little sense of history and even less comprehension of their place in the larger scheme of things.

Flieger 'A Cautionary Tale