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Originally Posted by davem
Well, my oft-stated position is that Eru is a character as much as Frodo, Gollum or Morgoth, & we can judge any character according to the standards of the created world.
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Well, that you may do on a personal level; but you cannot claim general validity of your conclusion, since your judgment is based on a self-contradictory premise, that Eru can be a finite being. As far as I know, any system that posits a God, "describes" him as infinite, unknowable. Also, such analysis is bound to reach only one conclusion in order to be coherent with Tolkien's larger work, where it is stated that Eru is to be seen as good, and thinking otherwise is the root of evil - thus rather excluding your right to question whether Eru is good or not. Even Aragorn's words from the Appendices imply, at least to me, a benevolent God. I don't need to play a fictitious hide-and-seek with the quotes outside LotR, where Tolkien clarifies what is implicit in the text; and if others choose to ignore the in-text implicit part, and the out-of-text clarification, then fine by me also.
As far as the quote from the Bible, it refers to emulating love for everyone; God in the Bible also provokes a similar events, but it can hardly be construed that those who try to emulate God, by the words of Jesus, should try to deal divine-like punishments too, since that is not a person's prerogative.
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I could argue that Wyrd is a 'religious' (or at least 'spiritual') concept & reading Wyrd into the story as a driving force is as valid as reading Eru into it - one doesn't need Eru to make the story 'spiritual', moral or 'religious'.
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I don't see how "Wyrd" can be "the One" or any other less explicit reference to Eru. As I said, different persons have different standards of understandability; I could even some as reading the first chapter and putting the book down, saying "I can completely see where this story is going, I need no more of it". Or at the other end, some would still hunger for more, even after reading everything possible. So I don't see the value of arguing over an interpretation that is lacking in information - one which neither you nor I share. We both have read the work in its entirety, LotR and Silmarillion, and I believe it is safe to say that Eru as part of the entire picture, and the same can be expected of the average reader who has access to the books.