According to Ishmael, symbolically speaking, eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil led man to believe that he could make choices for himself that took him out of the hands of the gods, which ultimately has led him (and the rest of the world) to the edge of his undoing. The thought occurred to me that perhaps Jesus understood this, and that baptism was his attempt to cleanse mankind from this knowledge. Perhaps this is how he intended to be the savior of man; by washing away the (original) sin of Adam and Eve and placing man back into the hands of the gods. Tragically, this is not the interpretation of Jesus's intentions as taught by modern Christianity. • Ishmael.org, the work & philosophy of Daniel Quinn