5 “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Why would anyone choose to know evil and all it horrendous out-workings like 9/11 and Somalia? The choice Eve made to listen to Satan’s half-truth was fatal, literally. Knowing good and evil was a big step. Satan said it was a step up, God knew it was a step down. We make the same choice when we choose evil. We think that it will bring us up to a new plain, to a new level of pleasure, to an exalted experience. But instead, sin brings us down, ever lower with each successive choice. Take porn as an example. Those who advocate porn’s usage to enhance sexual pleasure reap the benefit of that pleasure. They become ever increasingly unable to enjoy flesh-and-bone sexual experiences. Instead of enhancing their real-life experiences, porn detracts over time the pleasure being sought. The more porn is involved, the less sexual pleasure exists. The life of the creator of Playboy serves as the example in the extreme. I won’t go into details because I try to keep this fairly clean, but let me say that at the end of his life his sexual practices were so abnormal, so aberrant, that almost everyone would say he went off the deep end. And yet, with all this freedom to experience sex in every degenerate form, he was unable to experience the simplest pleasure of humans. On the other hand, growing healthy marital intimacy can grow higher and higher in fulfillment and pleasure over years, ending only with the death of the spouse. Any choice offered to us follows this two-pronged path. Obedience to God brings greater fulfillment and pleasure in its highest, most exalted state. Disobedience brings ever increasing emptiness and lack of satisfaction. But God allows us to choose which path we want. I think obedience has the better payoff, don’t you?
The Arnold Journey 