The Knowledge of Good and Evil

I. The Last Meal

There is a show on the internet called Last Meals. It runs on a YouTube cooking channel, Mythical Kitchen, and its conceit is exactly as morbid as it sounds: the host, Josh Scherer, cooks a guest the meal they say they'd want as their last one on earth, sits them down at a chintzy diner set, and interviews them about dying while they eat it. Every person, Scherer likes to open by saying, has exactly two things in common: we all have to eat, and we are all going to die.¹ It's a food channel — celebrity guest, big laughs, an obscene quantity of gravy. It should not keep turning into a confessional. It does, nearly every episode, because someone made to look at their own death over a plate of the food they love tends to stop performing, and someone who has stopped performing will tell you what they actually believe.

The guest is Corey Taylor. Frontman of Slipknot — nine men in masks, the loudest, most deliberately frightening thing Middle America produced in the nineties, the band your church warned you about. He is fifty-two. He is, by his own repeated account, a recovering alcoholic and addict who spent most of his life without, in his words, "a foundation in believing in something," and who was "pretty nihilistic" about the whole business of meaning. He once, drunk, tried to crowd-surf down a flight of stairs and lost a fight with a ceiling fan. This is not a man you expect to say anything true about God.

What he reaches for anyway, once the gravy is in front of him and the subject is the end, is not nihilism. It arrives in him by the one road that reliably gets a person there, which is the collapse of everything he used to think held him up.

I want to use his last meal to argue something about the first one. About a tree, and a piece of fruit, and the particular knowledge it's said to have handed us — the knowledge, the story calls it, of good and evil. My claim is that this knowledge is the knowledge of two powers: the conviction, which nearly all of us run on without noticing we hold it, that reality is split down the middle into a good force and an evil one — God and an adversary, us and them — locked in a war we are each enlisted in at birth. That conviction is the engine under most of what we call religion. It is the exact thing standing between us and the man that religion says it follows. He did not believe in two powers. He believed in one, and He asked us to trust it.

II. Two Powers

The man before the collapse is a clean specimen of the belief the rest of this essay is about. The belief is that there are two powers, and that your job is to fight on the right side. It does not feel like a belief. It feels like reality.

Ask Corey where his drive came from and he doesn't reach for a gift. He reaches for a wound — being abused as a child, he says, and ridiculed, and bullied; being someone whose worth was decided for him by other people. The engine he built out of that was resentment, and he is precise about how it ran: he would watch people he judged less talented get the opportunities he felt he'd earned, and it fanned the resentment, he says, rather than shaming him out of it. Every show was, in his word, a "dogfight." He was at war, and the war was the point.

That war requires a particular world. It requires two sides — a good one, his, and a bad one, everyone in his way. It requires a scoreboard. It requires that the self be walled off and defended, because on the far side of the wall are the rivals, the cheats, the ones who got what was his. Everything was stuck in his own orbit, he says of who he was; it had to be about him or he could not enjoy it. He got what the war promised — the arenas, the Grammy, the world — and found it empty: one day, he says, you wake up holding the world and find you do not care. He had spent decades sorting reality into two powers, mine and against-mine, and the sorting had walled him off so completely that by the end, he says, he "had hurt everyone I love" and could not feel any of it.

This is not a rock star's peculiar disease. It is the water we all swim in — the good guys and the bad guys, our side and their side, the war on this and the fight against that. And the tradition says the assumption has a birthday.

III. The Tree of Two Powers

Of all the trees in the garden, one is off-limits: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.² Not the tree of wickedness. Not the tree of disobedience. The knowledge of good and evil — the capacity to divide the world into two and take a side.

The serpent's promise is not what we were taught. It is not you will become wicked. It is ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.³ The bait is a position — the judge's seat, the vantage from which you sort creation into two piles and rule on which is which. And there is an old way of reading what happens the moment they take it, kept alive more by the mystics than by the pulpit, which I lean on while owning that it is a reading and not the consensus of the scholars. On this reading, the fall is not first the arrival of sin. It is the arrival of two. The instant their eyes are opened, the first thing they know is that they are naked, and ashamed: a self, suddenly, at war with its own body. Then they hide: a self cut off from God. Then, confronted, the man blames the woman and the woman blames the serpent: a self cut off from every other self.⁴ Shame, hiding, blame — three walls, in three verses.

So what Adam acquires at the tree is not wickedness. It is a worldview. He gains the conviction that there are two powers and that he must referee them, and every wall we have ever built runs back to it: the wall in Corey's chest, and the wall we put up against the person we have decided is on the other side. The tree taught us to see double. Almost everything we call human history is the record of what we did once we could.

IV. There Was Only Ever One

Here is the strange part, the part the tradition mostly forgot it was holding. Its own deepest layer says the two powers were never real. There is only one.

Isaiah has it at its most uncompromising, in the mouth of God: I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.⁵ That sentence refuses a great deal. It refuses a rival. It refuses a second throne across the field where a dark god rules the dark half of things. The verse is a hammer swung directly at the two-power picture: not God will defeat the darkness, which would still grant the darkness a throne to be knocked off, but there is no second power to defeat. The same note sounds through the whole tradition — Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one; I am the LORD, and there is none else; Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?⁶ One. Not one-winning-against-two. One.

Which means the thing we ate at the tree was not knowledge at all. It was a mistake — a way of seeing double that the tradition, at its clearest, keeps trying to correct. The devil was never a second god. Read the book of Job and the adversary is not an independent kingdom; he is a member of the divine court, on a leash. There are not two. There was only ever one, and we have spent the whole of our exile from the garden refereeing a war between forces only one of which was ever there.

V. What Jesus Does With the Two Powers

Everything Jesus does is unintelligible until you see it as the refusal of the second power.

Much of the religion built in His name runs on the two powers. It does not question them; it enlists on the good side and calls the enlistment holiness. Saved and damned. Clean and unclean. Scherer mentions, in passing, that he grew up forbidden to listen to Slipknot — his father, "not religious" and no believer in God or Satan either, took one look at the band and pronounced it "satanic." The two-power reflex doesn't even need a religion to run it: a man who believed in none of it still reached, on sight, for the darker of the two forces and filed a group of masked musicians under it, certain he himself stood with the light. And Corey, who spent that whole decade of what he calls "a satanic panic" cast as the enemy in other people's war, answers more gently than it deserves — that, he tells Scherer, says more about his father than it does about him.

Set beside the man it claims to follow, that machinery seizes. Jesus does not take the good side of the war between two powers. He calls off the war. Resist not evil, He says — do not even fight it, because to fight a thing is to grant it the standing of a power, and He will not grant it that.⁷ Judge not — put down the referee's whistle you picked up at the tree. To the crowd holding rocks: He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her — and the courtyard empties, and to the woman left standing: Neither do I condemn thee.⁸ And then the sentence that should end the refereeing business for good, spoken to a man who came looking for the top grade. Someone calls Him Good Master, and Jesus stops him cold: Why callest thou Me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.⁹

The one place every religious person is most desperate to stand — on the good side, the winning power's side — Jesus knocks out from under the very man reaching for it. The rich young ruler wanted his side of the ledger validated; what he got instead was the news that the ledger, and the two sides it kept, were the thing he had to give away. He couldn't. Almost nobody can. Because being told there are not two powers, and no good side to win onto, feels to the divided self exactly like being told there is no self — and it is not wrong to feel that, because the self it means is the one built at the tree. Call it the empty self. Not empty because it isn't there — it is there every morning — but because there is nothing under it. It is a position, not a person. It has a voice and a grievance and a scoreboard, and it has no ground.

None good but God is the end of that self's career, because its career was grading: itself, hour by hour, against a standard it had appointed itself to keep, and everyone else against the same. He does not tell the young man he is bad. He tells him the grade was never his to give or to get. That is not a harder rule. It is the end of the rule, and it is the one thing the empty self cannot survive, which is why the young man went away sorrowful.

This is why the belief in two powers is not a flaw in our following of Jesus. It is the thing that makes following Him impossible. You cannot join a man who has called off the war while your entire operating system is the fighting of it. He is standing in the no man's land we cannot cross, with the people we drew the line against, because to Him there was never a line, only people, and one power under all of them.

VI. One Power, and a Someone

Tear down a worldview and you owe the reader an account of what stands when it's gone. What does Jesus put where the two powers used to be? Not a better refereeing. And not, either, the thing you may be expecting from an essay that has said one this many times: a oneness to see through to, a single Self behind all the faces that you are supposed to realize you are. What He puts there is a Someone.

That they all may be one, He prays the night before He dies, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee.¹⁰ The oneness He means is the one He has with His Father — and He and the Father are not the same person. It is a oneness of will and of love between two who address each other, and He asks for us to be let into it. I am the vine, ye are the branches — a single life running through every branch, and every branch still a branch; the one that thinks itself a separate life has only forgotten where the sap comes from, and the cure is not to become the vine.¹¹ And the test He says the whole judgment turns on drops the as if we keep trying to smuggle back in: whatever you did to the least of these, He says, you did to Me.¹² Not as though to Me. He is in the one in front of you. He is not identical with them, and He is not absent from them, and you were dealing with Him the whole time and did not know it.

Even the commandment we quote most and examine least reads this way once the second power is gone. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself — not only as much as yourself, but as one the same Life holds, because the One who looks out of your eyes looks out of theirs.¹³ Paul, reaching for a picture, lands on a body: many members, one body, and the eye cannot say unto the hand I have no need of thee — not because the eye is secretly the hand, but because neither of them is the head. By Him, Paul says, all things consist. One power. Many someones. And a Someone who holds them.

Corey Taylor, sober and stripped of his war, reached for this at that last meal and could only find studio-rat words for it. Life is "symbiotic," he says; a series of systems, all of them permeating each other. He gropes for an image and finds the one on the floor of every stage he's played: a nest of tangled cables. You look at it, he says, and think you'll never untangle it — and the best of it is that you do not have to, because they are all running to different places and all doing the same thing. Every one of them, in his phrase, built to make sound, to make "beautiful noise." That is the vine and the branches in the only vocabulary he had, and the detail he gets right is the one people who talk about oneness get wrong: the cables are all running to different places, and no cable becomes another. And the reckoning he describes is the ethic of one body exactly: starting over by looking at how he had treated the people who worked with him, the people he loved, and "people who I didn't need anything from." Regard with nothing to win from it.

VII. How the War Ends

There is a way to hear all of this as a new and heavier demand — stop judging, love your enemies, see the one — a fresh scoreboard to lose on. That would be the two powers swallowing the gospel again. So it matters exactly how the war ended for Corey, because it did not end by his winning it.

It ended by his laying it down. He woke up one day, about three years before this interview, and could no longer stand the man he had built. "I wasn't happy," he says. "I had hurt everyone I love." Not a victory — a surrender. What rebuilt him was not willpower aimed at the enemy; it was the abandonment of the whole campaign: three therapists at once, a twelve-step program, and, because he couldn't trust the God the panic had handed him, a higher power he had to improvise from scratch. He calls it "Lord Mother," and describes it without any idea whose words he is speaking: "the yin and the yang. It's the alpha and the omega. It's the ending, the beginning, and it's everything around us." Everything around us. One power, in a metalhead's mouth — and a Someone, before it is a doctrine. He did not find a principle. He found a name to say things to.¹⁴

The two-power world says: fight the darkness, resist the evil, win. The tradition says: stop. You cannot defeat a second power, because there isn't one; there is only the fight itself, keeping you from the One who was always here. Corey didn't beat his demons. He stopped granting them the war. Once he redirected that gravity, he says, the old rage "shrunk." He does a gratitude list every night now — his wife, his daughter, the people behind the curtain, the person who made his coffee — because life, as he puts it, isn't just about you. He set the scoreboard down, and the wall it was written on came down with it.

And no bill comes due. This is the other thing the two-power world can't imagine — a God who does not punish. The wreckage of Corey's old life was real, but it was never a sentence handed down from a throne; it was what that way of living produces, the way a stone dropped produces a fall. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.¹⁵ Reaping is not wrath. It is not a second power called justice balancing the scales against a first power called mercy. It is one law, in one world, and the moment the sowing changes, so does the harvest. Corey is not being made to pay. He is being, in the oldest sense of the word, forgiven — which turns out to mean nothing more mysterious than this: the door was never locked, and there was never a warden.

VIII. Two Objections, Named Before You Raise Them

By now two complaints are standing up, and both are good.

The first is the serious one. If there are not two powers, if you erase good and evil, haven't you erased right and wrong — was what happened to Corey as a child not evil? Concede it completely, because the objection is right about everything except its target. To deny two cosmic powers is not to deny that a loving act and a cruel one differ, or that the harm done to a boy was anything less than harm. The difference between kindness and cruelty is real, and it is worth your entire life. What dissolves is not the difference between good and evil acts. It is the sorting of persons into good and evil kinds — the filing of a human being, whole, onto the far side of a line, so that we may stop owing them anything. Paul, staring at his own worst behavior, does not say I am evil. He says: it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.¹⁶ The wrong is real; it is not identical with the person. That is what Jesus does: fierce about the harm, never willing to lose the actor. The act can be condemned. The person cannot be filed under evil and shelved, because there is no such shelf.

The second objection is the cheap-sounding one. This is just pantheism — "we're all one, man" — the exact stoned epiphany you'd expect a metal singer to have over a bowl of nachos. Grant the resemblance. The beanbag version says God is the sum of the stuff, a warm fog we are all dissolved in, so that nobody is finally anybody and nothing is finally owed. This essay says there is one power and no second, and that the one power is not a fog but a Someone — a Father Jesus talks to, a Me in the least of these, a name Corey Taylor had to invent because he needed somebody to address. Pantheism has no one to say Thy will be done to. This has no one else to say it to. And that is not a comfort. It is the hardest thing anyone has ever been asked to believe, because it means the person you most want to keep on the far side of the line — the abuser, the enemy, the one the panic marked satanic — is not a second power, and is someone God has not left, and is loved by the same One who loves you. "We're all one, man" is a beanbag. This is a cross. The two only rhyme.

IX. Eat, Die, and Everybody Who Looks Like You

The two things the show is built on turn out to be the whole argument in disguise. The reason Scherer can seat anyone — the rock star, the addict, the nihilist — and reach the same honest place is that he starts from the two facts no line survives: everyone eats, and everyone dies.

Everyone eats. Strip away the arenas and the masks and the scoreboard, and the body is one need, the same need, in every person who ever lived. There is no good side and evil side of hunger. And everyone dies — which is the leveler that finally undoes the divided self, because the divided self is the one thing that does not survive it. Ask Corey what he thinks death is and, again without knowing whose language he's speaking, he describes a return: energy, he says, cannot be created or destroyed, so his own will be given back to the power source and dealt out again to whoever's next. He means it as a shrug. It is not a shrug. The self he spent forty-nine years defending turns out to have been on loan, about to be returned to the One it was borrowed from. He built a whole war to protect an orbit, and the last fact of his biology is that there was never anything at the center of it to protect. Only an empty self that thought there was. The man is not empty. The position was.

The line, one more time — the one you have been on the right side of your whole life. Between you and the enemy. Between you and God, off across the field, commanding the good army against the bad. And between you and a fifty-two-year-old metal singer eating chicken-fried steak under a slightly sublethal dose of gravy, with a ceiling-fan scar on his forehead and a made-up god named Lord Mother, telling a food channel the truest thing he knows. To follow Jesus all the way down is to watch that line go transparent — to see that there were never two powers with you enlisted on the better one, only one Being, looking out through your enemy's eyes and your own with the same light, and loving what He sees. And the sentence that began as a rebuke turns, at the very end, into the last light in the room: there is none good but one, that is, God — none; not you, not your enemy, not the boy in the makeup — and God is the only good there is, and is in every one of those faces, eating with them and dying with them and bringing every one of them home.

What that leaves you to do is smaller than you were afraid of. There was a lay brother in a Carmelite kitchen in Paris, three and a half centuries ago, who never resolved a single question about good and evil and did not try. He said he was pleased when he could take up a straw from the ground for the love of GOD, seeking Him only, and nothing else, not even His gifts.¹⁷ That is what stands where the two powers stood. Not a verdict you finally get right. A straw, picked up for Someone, and the grading left to Him.

At the end the host asks for his last words — the actual last words, this being a last meal. And Corey, who came in a nihilist and spent the hour accidentally testifying, points at the camera and delivers them, twice, as an obscenity aimed at everybody who looks like him. The host plays it for the laugh — Corey Taylor, ladies and gentlemen; what are you promoting, inner peace? — and Corey, with nothing to sell, gives the real last word: make every day matter.

It is not a benediction. It's a man told to say something final who tells the camera to f**k off. But that is the point, and I would not clean it up if I could. The curse turns before he can even finish it: and everybody who looks like you. He cannot aim the contempt at the audience without, in the same breath, widening it to take in everyone — which is the tell that it was never really contempt. No product to plug, no persona left to defend, the mask he made a career of just a thing on the table beside the gravy, and what comes out of him is a middle finger that can't help opening into an embrace. And then, when the host jokes that what he's promoting must be inner peace, he says the truest small thing he has: make every day matter. He thinks he's flubbing an outro. He's saying the whole essay. The one Life, looking out of a recovering nihilist in a diner set, telling everybody who looks like him — everybody — that there was never an enemy here.

Not a verdict. A table, and a seat at it with your name on the card, set by Someone else.

Footnotes

1. Last Meals with Corey Taylor, Mythical Kitchen (YouTube), host Josh Scherer, aired 12 July 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co7OFUEXIBA . Quotations throughout are from this interview, transcribed from the video's captions. Where the press coverage of the episode quotes the same lines — Loudwire and Louder on the higher power and the nihilism, Nu Metal Agenda on the morning he woke up unhappy — I have followed the published wording over my own transcription. Where it does not, and the exact syllables were not load-bearing, I have reported what he said rather than quoting it. If any wording here is still wrong, the error is mine and I would like to be told. ↩

2. Genesis 2:9, 2:17. ↩

3. Genesis 3:5. The reading of the fall as the birth of a divided, two-power mind — rather than primarily the arrival of moral guilt — runs through the contemplative tradition, and the two powers framing here rests on Isaiah 45:7's polemic against a second power (note 5). It is offered as a reading, not as the scholarly consensus on Genesis 3, which centers on disobedience and its consequences. ↩

4. Genesis 3:7-13. ↩

5. Isaiah 45:7 (KJV). The Hebrew ra' rendered "evil" here means calamity, woe, disaster — not moral evil; the verse is best read as an assertion of God's sole sovereignty over weal and woe alike, a polemic against the dualism (a good god of light, an evil god of darkness) of the surrounding cultures. That is precisely the point being drawn on: not that moral evil is unreal, but that there is no rival power. Overreading it as "evil does not exist" is exactly the overclaim to avoid. ↩

6. Deuteronomy 6:4 (the Shema); Isaiah 45:5-6, 18; Amos 3:6. On the adversary (ha-satan) as a member of the divine council rather than an independent power, Job 1-2 and Zechariah 3. ↩

7. Matthew 5:39 ("resist not evil"); Matthew 7:1 ("judge not"). Scripture throughout this essay is the King James, the house translation; deity pronouns take the house capital in the body, and the notes give the King James as it stands. ↩

8. John 8:7 and 8:11. (The passage — the pericope adulterae, John 7:53-8:11 — is absent from the earliest manuscripts and its canonical status is contested; noted rather than leaned on as bedrock.) ↩

9. Mark 10:17-22; the saying at 10:18 (KJV). The parallel at Luke 18:19 matches. Matthew 19:17 is the interesting one, and the difference is textual rather than editorial: the critical text has Why do you ask me about what is good?, while the Textus Receptus behind the King James has Matthew agreeing with Mark word for word — Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God. This essay quotes the King James throughout, so the divergence does not show in the body; it is worth owning rather than smoothing. ↩

10. John 17:21. ↩

11. John 15:5. ↩

12. Matthew 25:40. ↩

13. Mark 12:31, quoting Leviticus 19:18; 1 Corinthians 12:12-27; Colossians 1:17. ↩

14. That the one God is met, of necessity, in the personal form of a loving Other (a "Lord Mother," a Father, a master) is as old as the practice of prayer: Brother Lawrence, who had no system and wanted none, considered God "always as with me, often as in me" (The Practice of the Presence of God, Second Letter) — a Someone before a doctrine. ↩

15. Galatians 6:7-8. On consequence as the fruit of an act rather than a sentence from a throne, cf. Brother Lawrence, who, having failed, confessed it to God and "gave himself no further uneasiness about it" (The Practice of the Presence of God, Second Conversation). ↩

16. Romans 7:17, 20 ("it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me"). Paul's depersonalizing of sin — the wrong is real, but not identical with the self — is the exact distinction the objection requires. ↩

17. Brother Lawrence (Nicholas Herman, c. 1605–1691), The Practice of the Presence of God, Second Conversation, in the Epworth "authentic edition" reprinted by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library: "That he was pleased when he could take up a straw from the ground for the love of GOD, seeking Him only, and nothing else, not even His gifts." Quoted as printed, the edition's small-capital GOD included; another's text, neither bracketed nor recased. ↩