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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

You know how to ask the hard questions. It's not understood from Scripture that animals had moral sense. My thought is that God saw the loss of the animals as tragic. It's an aspect that I don't understand as well as I would like to.

Not sure that I see that God sees the loss of animals as "tragic." Though He may not forget sparrows (Luke 12:6) and knows when one of these 'pennyworth' birds hits the ground (Math 10:29), He also states that he is grieved that He created men and animals (Gen 6:7), and in the Flood wipes them all out (Gen 7:212-23). Adam sinned, yet the animal kingdom is also cursed for his disobedience.

Animals to me seem better treated in Arda.

And if you'd like a harder question, in the same vein as above, well...Let's assume that God had just cause to wipe out everything that breathed air on the planet. He's God, He has a reason for killing off the animals as well as mankind, okay. Later, when the Hebrews are moving to the Promised Land, they are called to wipe out a peoples, men, women and children (Deuteronomy 2, 3 and especially 1 Samuel 15:1-3). The common apologetics that I hear is that these people were very evil, and like a cancerous tumor, must be excised completely to protect others from being infected. Presumably even the infants were so genetically evil that sparing even these babes was a danger, as they would grow up to pollute the community.

That's a bit hard to accept.

Worse, to me, is that God did not call down fire or whatever to terminate these people in a humane fashion. He had them butchered, which is bad, but worse is that He used other humans as His sword. Can you even imagine what it would be like to be in Saul's army, having just exterminated a city, men, women and children? What does that do to one's soul, and if that's to be to the greater glory of God...

And with that, I'll end by pointing to Jonah 4:10, where suddenly God has pity on a city and its cattle.

At least orcs are not humans, and maybe that's why I don't feel for them when they are obliterated. Is that why ME and Eru is more palatable?

As to great floods on record or legend, there are reports that there are remains of civilization at the bottom of the Black Sea, suggesting that at one time it was an area that though below sea level, was dry .... until some kind of rather large disaster (which literally means 'undo-star') .... filled the basin with water.

Saw a documentary of the same thing. It's interesting that so many cultures have a Flood story (even Middle Earth ), and one wonders of the event that sparked the story, back when humans were all together in one central location.

Why not? I don't see that Tolkien's (assumed) understanding of myths as distorted versions of Bilbical truth, forces his hand to write everything imitatively of the Bible.

Again: why must it? One will find the true echoes not in the details, which one would hope are different, but in the themes.

While citing the Biblical quotes above, I noted (yet again) that in Genesis the river Tigras in mentioned as a boundary of Eden. Who then has not looked at a map and played the 'where's Eden' game? You can find the Tigris, but have to speculate from there. Is there more entertainment value when we are given only seeds and not the full-blown tree? Like the other game where one looks at the maps of the Third Age and wonders if Belfalas were...