Quote:
God would not permit death in a world not overcome by sin

While I'm sure He has His reasons, personally I'm much fonder of the Middle-Earth idea of death, as laid out in The Silmarillion: humans, alone among sentient races, are genuinely extinguished and dead when they die, and the immortal elves, who clearly look on this with a certain amount of envy, call death "the Gift of the Valar" (that is, of the gods).

(It annoyed me when they messed with this in the Return Of The King film: Gandalf at the siege of Minas Tirith reassures Pippin by talking about the afterlife, but it's an afterlife that Pippin, who's clearly descended from humans not elves, doesn't get.)

Peter