“The transgression of Adam and Eve was not in learning the difference between good and evil but in treating the knowledge they received as something that was, literally, internal to them-a food that could be seized, devoured, and controlled by the individual.”

“So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.”

“[I]t was with a good end in mind – that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil – that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good.”

“Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable”

“How does the capacity to do evil exist, if that capacity is not within the creator as well? It’s just not possible. The fruit that Adam and Eve eat is from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Interesting. So according to Genesis the knowledge of good and evil existed before Adam and Eve ate the fruit and thereby gained access to that knowledge, and if the knowledge of good and evil existed, then good and evil existed as well, and it all came from God, the creator. Obviously. Also, God didn’t have to unleash suffering and death on everybody who ever lives forever and ever until the end of the world because two people ate a piece of fruit. He just felt like it.”

“if anything, you may think of me as Adam without his Eve, cast out of the Garden with no hope of ever returning.”

“Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.”