The Forbidden Fruit

Looking into the concept of Adam & Eve, and the forbidden fruit:
We were in a park last summer when a group of religious people, who had set themselves up with a powerful sound system at the other end of the park, started up a Holy Roller type sermon. As I was being bombarded by what seemed to me like abusive crap echoing out of loudspeakers, it occurred to me how the concept of "the knowledge of good and evil casting Adam & Eve out of the Garden of Eden" might be more purely viewed.

The apple (forbidden fruit) was symbolic of a form of knowledge which was not yet present. It was only this knowledge that made something which was idyllic into something that was, all of a sudden, not okay. In fact, it brought shame and torment. I'm willing to bet, that the type of knowledge this points to is the discerning, judging mind of entrenched Humanity without the wisdom and grace of spirit. Once people began to use their Human minds alone to apply value judgments to life's events and ways of being, we saw the beginning of a polarization which cemented itself into "good & evil". In this way, it's not really a person's actions that determine good or evil as much as the application of judgment. It's "the need to discern in order to polarize" itself, which cast humanity out of the blissful natural space of not applying judgment and condemnation, instead of just seeing things, truly, for what they are, with wisdom and compassion. That it's the mind's need to dominate, and use knowledge and reason (in a contrived way) to isolate wrongness, call that evil, and condemn, banish, or nail this to a tree, which has thrown us out of "God's Grace".

It seemed ironic that the preacher, who was busy jabbing his finger threateningly at the evil in people and the world, and ranting about the need for people to repent... if seen in the light I've just presented, would itself be the embodiment of evil.