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Originally Posted by Kuruharan
What it sounds like you are saying is that you find it perfectly alright to kill on a huge (indeed total) scale through disease and decay, but object to an intervention to end one particular life. However, the end of both is the same thing. This really almost seems like splitting hairs. I have to ask why you find the built in death to be so preferable?
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No its not. Men are given the gift of death, the freedom to pass beyond the circles of the world. In other words it is not their nature to remain in the world. One could argue the same with Smeagol, so that he should have died many years previously & that Eru was merely taking away the
unnatural 'gift' bestowed on him by the Ring. My point in this context is not that it is wrong for Smeagol to
die - death in itself is not wrong - it is that Eru intentionally kills him when he wouldn't otherwise have died. Gollum's death is not a result of natural causes, but of the will of Eru.
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Well, that would sort of be messing with the freedom of choice thing that was also part of Eru’s Gift to Men.
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But surely that's the case with
any direct intervention by Eru - by His destruction of the Numenorean fleet Eru takes away Men's freedom of choice. A 'gift' that can be taken back at any time the giver feels like is hardly a 'gift' at all.
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This sort of renders a large part of the point of Answer to Job irrelevant to the discussion.
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I didn't bring up AtJ because of any similarity of Gollum to Job, but because of what it says about God - specifically in relation to Eru's use of his creation & His apparent belief that He is beyond question in anything He does. Eru allows evil to come into the world, so ultimately He is responsible for its existence. The argument that this is a requirement of a truly free creation doesn't wash, because He will take away that freedom whenever He sees fit.
Anyway, I'm sort of wishing I hadn't dragged primary world religion into this & I'm happy to agree to disagree on this one.