[cornelis]

Our Eastern forebears condemned us for having eaten fo the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the fathers of the West, the fathers of the best within us, have nourished us for more than two millennia on precisely that self-same fruit.

This is a subversive plot you weave, Mr. Swann. We nourished ourselves for two milennia on the evil of sex?

[Billthedrill]

Nicely put. As a philosophical point, I think that the knowledge of good and evil was a proscribed thing largely because it placed its holders in the precarious position of being able to know, choose, and actively pursue evil. That form of free will, of enablement of the individual, is central to Western thought. With a gradual loss in belief in large portions of the population of being held to account in the afterlife for this choice, it begins to appear as if the Proscriber of the knowledge of good and evil just might have had something on the ball after all. I'm sure God will be delighted to learn that I approve...