Lost!

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Eliza Hodgkins 1812

I know the show has always been leading up to an eventual good/evil battle. I guess I find the previous allusions to and hints more interesting than the actual Jacob/MIB characters. Even if they turn out to be the bible's Jacob and Esau, I do like that they play more like the gods in Myths. Lost of the Titans!

I'm running on the assumption that they will continue to be some combination of many different mythologies, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Biblical. With the implication being that the mythologies are all man's flawed attempts at recording what is "actually" happening. So they will bear resemblance to many different elements of the mythologies (Jacob and Esau, God and Satan, Zeus and Hades, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum) without being exactly any of them.

Is he saying that all mankind is capable of good and evil, it comes down to the choices we make, and MIB would just be too capable of tipping the scales way too far in one direction?

That seems to be it.

Interestingly, all of the candidates, by the time they got on flight 815, were leading lives that had them essentially hell-bound. So in that sense it could be viewed that Jacob was giving them an opportunity to save themselves.

Of course, it's also been said that Jacob was the one who influenced them to make the choices that lead them there. Which is why I'm guessing that in the flash-sideways storyline we will learn that even without that touch from Jacob, they all would have eventually gone down a path towards hell anyway, they just wouldn't have taken the detour through the island, receiving that opportunity to be saved.