It is an import question really.
In the midst of this “discussion”, Immanuel Can has become the subject of examination because he exemplifies an intellectual stance that allows him to “believe in” A&E dropped down onto the Earth, an absurd belief that uproariously Immanuel attempts to reconcile with physical anthropology and his Original Mating Couple.
That Immanuel does this, that it is done by men in our modernity, is what Master BigMike tried to bring out in this thread.
What I have done, or am attempting, is to point out that these “pictures”, and all religious symbolism, serve a function of emblemizing truths that can only be understood if a metaphysical plane is understood to be their subject.
And to further state that it is only through intellectus that what is indicated as “existing” at a metaphysical level is perceivable by man. A man who has lost access to what is metaphysically real, who cannot or will not conceive of it, cuts himself off from an entire world. Not the physical world obviously, since that is all that he allows to “exist”.
I would then go on to examine the admonition about choosing to “go through the narrow gate” in a quite different sense than Immanuel Can (the supposed religionist among us) will allow. The “narrow gate” is then not what Immanuel Can continually suggests: getting down on one’s knees and begging Jesus (as if Jesus controls a switch) to grant one “salvation”, but actually involves something different. Immanuel Can’s religious admonitions, like his silly view of Adam & Eve, are suitable for those who reason at a child’s level. But they are necessarily rejected by those who reason in modern terms.
Henry: Evil is the commodification of a person.
But what evil is is not the topic. Immanuel, in typical manner, attempts to move the topic away from himself — the hardcore religious believer who attempts to suggest that there really was a Garden of Eden and that all man’s problems are a result of this literal fall.Immanuel: Very good. I agree that's evil.
The problem's going to come when we try to explain why. In a secular world, human beings have no special intrinsic dignity...they're just another animal, as you've often pointed out to Mikey. Now, if human beings were, say, made by God, in His image and for His purposes, then maybe we could talk about intrinsic dignity; but in a secular world, what tells us that human beings can't/shouldn't be commodified?
My suggestion is that we should not jump so quickly to define what is ‘evil’ but should rather define what is both “good for man” and good in life, and also what is “bad” for man or leading to “error”. And my assertion is that what is real and important about life, in life, is uniquely perceivable by way of intellectual intuition.
That is, he must believe that "good" and "evil" are merely subjective descriptions of human reactions to things -- reactions that cannot possibly be justified on the basis of reference to some objective Good or Evil, but rather are figments of imagination. And if he tries to ground them in society, then he's at a loss for how to justify the supposition that his society is a legitimate moral indicator...for again, he cannot appeal to the idea of a "just society" or "my society is right because it's my society," because he's already banished the idea that there's such a thing as an objectivley good society...and the same goes for the race as a whole: what assures us that the collective preferences of the human race (which after all, has a long legacy with things like slavery, wife-beating, prostitution and murder, as well as what we would want to call "good" things) are any better or more definitive than the desires of a particular society or of an individual? 
