[Roa_Aoife]

I can't let this go unanswered. It seems that one Verlyn Flieger has a rather onesided view of Christian beliefs. Unfortunately, this shortcoming is shared by far too many people, on all sides of every debate involving it.

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

If one truly studies the Bible where it describes Mankind as a whole, the world is a very dark and ugly place, where we screw up constantly, and hope for us is all but gone.

So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them." -Gen 6:7

29They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. -Rom 1:29-30

19Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. ....48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. -Math 5:19-20, 48

Right away, we have a sense of hopelessness. The world is evil, fallen, and the only way around it is perfection or mercy.

In this [i.e. Tolkien’s own] Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the world (Eä); and Eä 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)

In truth, we don't know when the fall of Satan took place, all we know is that it took place sometime before the fall of Man, and that it was indeed Satan who pled to the free-will of both Eve and Adam. It has been said that the Angelic fall happened after the creation of the world, some say during, and other's say well before. There is nothing to say that the angels weren't involved in some way, though there certainly isn't anything saying they were.

Many would say that the fall was inevetible because of how things were set up in the Garden. I could argue till I'm blue in the face about why the fall happened, why there was a forbidden tree in the first place, and what God was doing while all this was going on (surely He was aware) but that would be a bit off topic. All I'll say is that the Fall was an onvious possiblity, maybe it was even supposed to happen.

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.

Uninvolved? He may have allowed the Ainur, with their free will, to sing in dischord, but everytime Eru wove the dischord into an even more wonderful melody than had been before. He turns evil to good, sets up the Valar to help and guide his children, who, though imperfect follow Him as best they can. He even moves in some less obvious ways, as pointed out by LMP.