Lalwende wrote:
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Tolkien has in some ways 'failed' to move me, not in any way with Lord of the Rings etc, but in what he showed us of Eru in the Silm, well, this god he created leaves me utterly cold. Eru is fascinating in a Jovian kind of way, but he also disgusts me more than a little bit; I simply cannot reconcile the idea of an often petty, bad-tempered and disinterested god (he actually reminds me of Henry VIII quite often ) with anything good
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I'm afraid I'm having a hard time seeing things from this point of view. Your description, it seems to me, might be applied to the God of the Old Testament (and to Pullman's Authority before he became feeble), but it doesn't seem to fit Eru. Eru and Yahweh, as literary characters in their respective stories, are portrayed quite differently. Eru does no smiting, lays down no jealous commandments against idols, does not select a 'chosen people' whose foes are disfavoured. Eru actually does very little after creating Ea. He gives life to the Dwarves (surely the act of loving god), he advises Manwe from time to time, and then he destroys Numenor. Now certainly that last act could be seen as vengeful, and called into question (it is of course on par with the Judeo-Christian God's deluge). I believe there was a thread on that a while back. But it's a single incident (not even in the 'Silmarillion proper'), and hardly seems to merit your sweeping characterization.
Insofar as the charge is 'cold and disinterested' (which is altogether a different thing from petty and bad-tempered), I will agree with you. But this is 'problem of evil' territory. Anyone who posits an omnipotent God is going to have to make him or her either petty and malicious or cold and distant, as it is certainly a fact that bad things happen to good people. If you are going to take Pullman's Dust as his true, loving and merciful, God (which I think is inevitable) then doesn't the charge of 'cold and distant' apply to it as well? Though I suppose the Dust is different, as it is explicitly (and emphatically)
not omnipotent.