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Originally Posted by davem
Legate I still can't see how you could classify the meal as 'good' if you had nothing with which to compare it. If you only ever had 'good' meals you would not think of the meal as good - you would simply think of it as a meal. 'good' implies the existence of 'bad'. If only 'good' existed you wouldn't need the word 'good'. But this is not merely a linguistic debate.
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Only to this: this is what I said in my post, that if you use "good" as description of something which is "better than something else" , then you must have evil with it, of course. I emphasised the "linguistic debate" thing - this is actually also what I said in my post above, it depends on what you imagine under the word "good" (you say "good" but if you wanted to describe what you imagine under it, you imagine actually something "better", "qualitatively higher than standard". Cf. above). Otherwise, in a world where no evil exists, the "good"=simply "normal", the inhabitant does not feel the "good" things as something "better than normal" because "good" is norm - as you said. But this does not mean that the "normal" thing is not "good" for you - qualitatively, it helps you somehow, it is, well,
good for you. This is the meaning of
good I'm using here. And this is the point of my post above. This is what I wanted to say.
Aside from that, with the rest of your points - as well as Lal's - I more or less agree. Good point about the light looking brighter next to darkness, yes, and the moral choices impossible without choice of evil - quite. Nothing to add to that (or at least I don't want to start on it now).
EDIT: Okay, I decided to add something. Well, the main thing I'd point to your two posts would be that the main thing we have to take in mind, and this is what the point was, that Eru/God does not invent (in a metaphysical, not physical sense = by physical I mean things like that "if he didn't want Men to kill each other, he should not have invented pointy things" - this is another dimension and totally out of what the main meaning is) or
support evil, if you want to say it like that, he "sided" with the good things. There is the option to do evil, though he does not approve this. So there is no way of saying "but he
made the evil..." Nope. So to make matters clear, for those who could think different, because this I think wasn't mentioned. So applying this on Melkor, he was on the "wrong side" - yes, evil.
That would be all.