What did we lose in the fall?

Have you ever really thought about what the fall has done to our sense of right and wrong? I'm not talking about any punishment or curse. I'm talking about the story of Eden, about the act of stretching out our hand to eat from that tree. The tree was knowledge, wasn't it? Knowledge is good, isn't it? If we had loved knowledge for its own sake, I wonder very much what would have happened; there are those who say that God would have given us that knowledge at the right time.

But we didn't want knowledge for its own sake. We had no interest in knowledge as knowledge. We wanted it for power and status, so we could be like God. As long as we want knowledge for power or status, we will never use it rightly. We already made it plain why we wanted it, what we planned to gain from it, how we will use it.

Look very carefully at exactly what kind of knowledge was supposed to be given: the knowledge of good and evil. That is to say, knowledge of morality, knowledge of ethics. We set out to gain "moral knowledge" in order to gain power and status. It was an intrinsically perverse action, taking up morality because we thought we could use it to gain something. The morality we gained was tainted. Our knowledge of good and evil was imprinted with our decision: the ultimate good in our eyes was not quite what it should have been. And time after time when the call for "morality" goes out, we see that we are still using morality to gain status and power.

There truly is good, and knowledge of good and evil. But so long as we take the "knowledge of good and evil" in order to use it for our own gain, we will never be able to see it. Right and wrong have to be re-thought from the foundation.