Q: What excuse did Adam give to his children as to why he no longer lived in Eden?


Scroll down for the answer...











A: Your mother ate us out of house and home

Okay, veer to the right now...

Amos 3:12
This is what the LORD says: "As a shepherd saves from the lion's mouth only two leg bones or a piece of an ear, so will the Israelites be saved, those who sit in Samaria on the edge of their beds and in Damascus on their couches. "

Football... are you talking about soccer people kick or that brown leather ball people kill themselves trying to move around a field?  No pain, no gain.

Now Grammyluv, NFL style football does take strenuous work and brilliant strategy to pull off.  Baseball is simple, you just hit a ball with a stick and run.  Having read some of your posts here, I believe you have a noggin that is not just a hat rack.    I believe you would make a good armchair football strategist if given the chance.

I have yet to find a job, but I have been busy looking for one, and using my time wisely at my church.  We just had a summer evening outreach concert.  Our pastor's son is a finger pickin' guitarist who enjoys playing Chet Atkins style music.  We had quite a few people come, and 49 people filled out our response cards.  I'm working on planning for our Fall Harvest Fest on October 25 this year.  I'm looking for fun but educational ideas.  If you might know of any, please start a thread in case other Christians are searching for ideas.

I have also been busy researching Rick Warren and the Emergent Church.  I felt challenged to after some discussions here on this forum.  Please pray for me in this endeavor.  It has scared me how far this emerging evil has progressed.  I will post or email people my work when I'm done.

Sincerely,
Ken the MangoMan

[LOL]

Statistically, when people give 3 choices, they usually try to hide the correct answer in the midst of the group.  That said, my money's on Zephaniah.

From the King James Version, not that I'm a die-hard zealot of the KJV...

Zephaniah 1

 1The word of the LORD which came unto Zephaniah the son of Cushi, the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amariah, the son of Hizkiah, in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah. Zephaniah 1

 7Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord GOD: for the day of the LORD is at hand: for the LORD hath prepared a sacrifice, he hath bid his guests.

 8And it shall come to pass in the day of the LORD's sacrifice, that I will punish the princes, and the king's children, and all such as are clothed with strange apparel.


LOL, now that I've got Grammyluv flustered about how she orders her choices, I must admit that my statement was in jest, a postulate at best.     Statistics was an interesting class, but it kicked me around more than I liked.  It didn't help that I got sick that semester either.  Maybe I should go back through her posts on this thread and see if my statement is true.  Have a good day to everyone.  Thankfully Grammyluv can't rain hot coals on my head, although she does pray to the One who could.   

Sincerely,
Ken The MangoMan

Yeah Blackeyedpeas, sorry for the double post.  I didn't see it post my first one.  By the way, those peas in reality are a tasty bunch.  Good, old, Southern blackeyed peas, um um good!

Thank you for your patience with this newbie.    I will implement strategies you two mentioned.  I guess part of my frustration was in losing what I'd read and wanted to share.  Mr. Warren is a Southern Baptist minister, but I'm deeply concerned by what I have read and how pragmatic and respected he is among the evangelical world.  I know good churches who have done the 40 Days of Purpose.  The danger is in the sowing of seeds of destruction.  Something is wrong, why aren't men of God standing up and saying this is bunk.  I talked with my pastor's son this afternoon as we were taking a break from passing out fliers for a church event.  Thankfully, he felt like I do, so some people are being discerning but others I feel are being duped.  In reading the junk this morning, I read how Mr. Warren played a Jimmy Hendrix rock song during praise and worship, said it needed to be done, and was glad he finally got to do it.  Now I kind of understand why some people have such a harsh stance on contemporary Christian rock music.  If we can't distinguish who's good and who's not, then the problem is all the more insidious.  I think I'm going to email my pastors back in St. Louis and Kansas City the stuff I read.  Maybe it's a small step, but it's something.
Sincerely,
Ken the MangoMan

TO THE ADMIN OF THIS SITE... A SUGGESTED MODIFICATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am sorely irked.  I realize I am responsible.  I wrote a diatribe about Saddleback and Rick Warren because of the Saddleback hosted political debate tonight which will be aired on Fox News.  I began innocently enough, but was startled and scared by what I learned as I wrote it.  Saddleback is the dark horse of the Emerging Church.  I ripped quotes from secular and religious articles alike, some from pieces or comments made by Rick Warren himself.  Alas, my endeavors were longer than 60 minutes and the website so graciously blew my article away like a vapor on the wind.  I guess I need to write faster.  Is there anyway that a message could be posted saying something about needing to relogon without deleting what was written?  I don't see that being difficult to accomplish.  Dump the data into a temp buffer and then after relogin, post it.

Aggravated in San Diego,
The MangoMan

[SADDLEBACK IS HOSTING A MCCAIN / OBAMA DEBATE WHICH IS BEING AIRED BY FOX NEWS.]

Hey,
I just put a lot of effort into an thread article with documented quotes and what not.  I pressed post and lost the article because the site said I'd been on for over an hour.  My message was gone like a vapor.  Is there anyway that in the future, a nice message can still say "You've been on for over an hour..." but the message NOT be deleted.
Aggravated in San Diego,
The MangoMan

I had pulled quotes from secular and religious tomes about Saddleback and Rick Warren.  I pulled out quotes by Rick himself.  It was scary.  Read my Obama post on how Rick gave his podium to Obama in 2006.  I also found that Hillary Clinton got to use it as well during an Aids Convention there at Saddleback.  Saddleback is clearly an Emerging Church.  Rick Warren wrote the foreword to Dan Kimball's book The Emerging Church, and he figures prominently in the book itself.  Rick Warren is politically active in promoting the World Church.  In writing my original article which was so gratefully deleted, I got more and more concerned the more I read from a variety of sources which have been posted on the web.  I urge you to research just a little.  This is important, especially in light of what's happening tonight...

SADDLEBACK IS HOSTING A MCCAIN / OBAMA DEBATE WHICH IS BEING AIRED BY FOX NEWS.

Hey Everyone,
I've heard tale about the emergent church.  I want to know more about it.  What I've heard so far, I don't like.  What is it?  Is it evil from within?  Who is part of it?  Why is it so intertwined with the evangelical church if it is insidiously wrong?  Is it a new phase, or is it actually something much older, hence it's ability to blend within the church ranks?  Why does it aspouse the dropping of the name Christian for the name Christ follower when that's what Christian means?  I'm looking for intelligent conversation here.  I believe this is something we all need to be aware of.
Sincerely,
The MangoMan

Again, just looking at his past to get an idea of his present character...

ELECTION 08: Obama slams 'Christian Right,' voices faith in testimony; ...

Posted on Jun 28, 2007 | by Jennifer Thurman

WASHINGTON (BP)--Sen. Barack Obama, D.-Ill., spoke openly about his religious views at a United Church of Christ meeting June 23 in Hartford, Conn., saying the religious right had played a role in "hijacking faith."

"Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart," Obama said. "Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us.

"At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design."

However, the rest of Obama's 30-minute message focused on an intimate retelling of his conversion experience, which David Brody, senior national correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network, commended in his weblog, "The Brody File."

"Besides Obama, how many times have you seen a presidential candidate get up in front of a large crowd and talk in depth about his salvation? I'll give you the answer: Zero," Brody said. "For Obama to stand up and talk about how Jesus changed his life, my friends that takes guts. You may disagree with everything he's about, you may disagree with his policy goals but as Christians, shouldn't we like it when someone talks about Christ being the missing ingredient in his life?"

Obama spoke about working alongside churchgoers to rebuild poor neighborhoods in Chicago in 1985, an experience that led him to begin attending Trinity United Church of Christ, which culminated in his conversion.

"I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, He would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in Him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life," Obama said.

"It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and ... kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God's Spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out His works."

Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, a church with 1.2 million members that is considered one of the most liberal among the Protestant churches.

[Obama Wows the Religious Right]

Obama Wows the Religious Right
Posted December 5, 2006
By E.J. Dionne

WASHINGTON—American politics took an important turn last week at a church in the foothills of Southern California’s Santa Ana Mountains.

When Rick Warren, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.

For his part, Obama, the former community organizer from Chicago, showed why he is this moment’s hottest commodity in 2008 presidential politics, even though he has not entered the race yet.

For a quarter-century since the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, white evangelical Christians have widely been seen as a Republican preserve. No one did a more comprehensive job of organizing them than President Bush, and he carried the white evangelical vote in 2004 over John Kerry by a margin of nearly 4-1. Many of the most politically active evangelical leaders have insisted that the morally freighted social issues—abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage—took priority over all questions.

Enter Warren, or Pastor Rick as he likes to be known. Warren is no political liberal. On the contrary, his views on the hot-button issues are reliably conservative, and he has said that members of his sprawling Orange County congregation probably vote overwhelmingly Republican.

But Warren speaks for a new generation of evangelicals who think that harnessing religious faith too closely to electoral politics is bad for religion, and who are broadening the evangelical public agenda to include a concern for global poverty and the scourge of AIDS.

Warren is also the most gifted religious entrepreneur since Billy Graham. Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Life’’ has sold in the tens of millions, and his specific model for the mega-church has spread all over the country. He is not building a new denomination. He is building a new network, and it’s powerful. Warren and his wife, Kay, have made alleviating the AIDS crisis in Africa one of the central components of their mission.

And thus it came to pass that when Warren called a conference at his church last Friday on World AIDS Day, among those he invited were two potential presidential candidates. It was unsurprising that one of them was Sen. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican and a loyal social conservative who has taken up the AIDS issue with passion and commitment.

But when the other invitee turned out to be Obama, parts of the old evangelical political apparatus took after Warren as a heretic. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, declared that Obama’s views on abortion—Obama is pro-choice—represented “the antithesis of biblical ethics and morality’’ and insisted that Warren had no business inviting him to Saddleback.

Warren’s church issued a statement reaffirming its strong opposition to abortion, but Warren did not back down. Indeed, he seemed to revel in rejecting the old evangelical political model. “I’m a pastor, not a politician,’’ Warren told ABC News. “People always say, ‘Rick, are you right wing or left wing?’ I say I’m for the whole bird.’’

When it came his turn to speak, Obama took on the moral message of evangelical AIDS activists—and then challenged them.

“Let me say this and let me say this loud and clear: I don’t think that we can deny that there is a moral and spiritual component to prevention,’’ he declared. “In too many places ... the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down and needs to be repaired.”

Then Obama got to what “may be the difficult part for some,’’ as he put it, that “abstinence and fidelity, although the ideal, may not always be the reality.’’

“We’re dealing with flesh-and-blood men and women, and not abstractions,” Obama said, “and that if condoms and potentially things like microbicides can prevent millions of deaths, then they should be made more widely available. ... I don’t accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence.”

That Obama received a standing ovation suggests that Warren is right to sense that growing numbers of Christians are tired of narrowly partisan politics and share his interest in “the whole bird.’’ In their different spheres, Warren and Obama are both in the business of retailing hope.

One more thing: If you read Obama’s speech, you’ll realize he demonstrates a much truer Christian spirit than the GOP masterminds who have recently tried to push people away from Obama by pointing out that his middle name is Hussein.

[Obama Making Christian Push]

Obama Making Christian Push
By Daniel Burke
Religion News Service
Saturday, June 21, 2008; Page B09

WASHINGTON -- With the Democratic presidential nomination in his grasp, Sen. Barack Obama is making a full-throttle push for centrist evangelicals and Catholics.

It's a move that's caught some conservative evangelicals off guard. They say they are surprised and dismayed to see a liberal-minded politician attempting to conscript their troops. At the same time, they say that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has done little to court their affections.

"I've never seen anything quite like it before," said evangelical author Stephen Mansfield, who wrote "The Faith of George W. Bush" and has a forthcoming book about Obama.

"To be running against a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and to be reaching into the Christian community as wisely and knowledgeably as (Obama) is -- understanding their terms and their values -- is just remarkable."

This month, the Illinois senator held a closed-door meeting in Chicago with almost 40 Christian leaders, including evangelical heavyweights such as the Rev. Franklin Graham, publishing magnate Steve Strang and megachurch pastor Bishop T.D. Jakes.

Obama's campaign is also launching a grass-roots effort, tentatively called Joshua Generation, with plans to hold concerts and house meetings targeted at young evangelicals and Catholics.

A political action committee set to launch this month, the Matthew 25 Network, plans to direct radio advertising and mailers to Christian communities while talking up Obama in the media. The group is not officially tied to the Obama campaign.

Obama's emphasis on faith outreach plays to his strengths, campaign observers say. The senator is at ease speaking about religion and preaches a message of forging common ground with disparate communities.

Still, some religious leaders wonder whether Obama's Christian-focused outreach might alienate Jewish and Muslim voters, for example, not to mention the Democratic Party's large secular wing.

"You really have to consider the question: What message does this send to people of other faiths?" said the Rev. Romal J. Tune, a Washington pastor who works on religious outreach with the Democratic National Committee.

Joshua DuBois, Obama's director of faith outreach, said the campaign is "not solely focused" on evangelicals and Catholics but "committed to reaching people of faith broadly and trying to bridge religious divides."

Nonetheless, Obama has clearly learned a lesson from previous, unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidates: Ignore -- or dismiss -- evangelicals at your peril.

Despite the concerted push, Obama faces a tough task in trying to loosen the GOP's hold on a majority of white churchgoers. A recent poll by Calvin College found McCain leading Obama 57 percent to 25 percent among evangelicals and 43 percent to 35 percent among Catholics.

"Right now there's really more continuity than change" among religious voters, said John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "But we're at the beginning of the campaign, and what campaigns try to do is change people's minds."

Obama may have done some of that at the Chicago meeting, which one adviser described as a "Nixon goes to China" moment.

Abortion and gay marriage -- issues on which he openly disagreed with many of the evangelical leaders in the room -- dominated the discussion, according to participants.

Still, Strang wrote in a blog, Obama "won over the loyalties of many."

"He came across as thoughtful and much more of a 'centrist' than I would have expected," Strang wrote, adding that he hopes McCain will host a similar gathering.

Mansfield said he sees similar political acumen in the Joshua Generation program. Often used as a "mobilizing phrase" among evangelical church youth groups, the name refers to the biblical story of Joshua, who did what Moses could not: lead his people into the Promised Land.

"The impressive thing about Obama is that he knows this," Mansfield said. "This is language you expect to hear at a youth rally, not from the presidential campaign of the most liberal member of the Senate."

The Matthew 25 Project, named after the biblical passage in which Jesus promises eternal life for those who care for the least and the lost, will be led by Mara Vanderslice, a young evangelical who briefly led faith outreach for the 2004 campaign of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and later founded a respected political consulting firm.

About 40 people turned up for a $1,000-a-head Washington fundraiser this month to hear about the group's plans for targeting Catholics, moderate evangelicals, Hispanic Catholics and Protestants, Vanderslice said.

The PAC is just one "piece of the faith outreach puzzle," said Mike McCurry, a former press secretary for President Bill Clinton who is advising the project.

"For evangelicals, obviously this is an uphill battle. No one is proposing that we go and win a majority of them," McCurry said. But there are significant numbers of moderate Christians "and we need to reach them."

[Barack Obama targets the religious Right]

Barack Obama targets the religious Right
Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama is aiming to lure members of the religious Right, the movement that twice helped George W Bush win the White House.
 
By Alex Spillius in Washington
Last Updated: 1:40PM BST 12 Jun 2008

His campaign is set to launch the Joshua Generation Project, an initiative that will include household gatherings, blogs and concerts, to attract young evangelicals and Catholics ahead of November's US presidential election.

The campaign has noted an "unprecedented energy" among young religious people for the Illinois senator and aims to bring them into a new coalition of voters that will include non-devout youth, independent voters and some Republicans.

Earlier this week Mr Obama in his home city Chicago held a meeting with 30 religious leaders, authors and theologians, many of them who have not declared their support. In what was wide-ranging, two-hour discussion, spokesman for Franklin Graham, who succeeded his father as head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said on Wednesday that he found the senator "impressive" and "warm".

David Brody, senior correspondent with the Christian Broadcasting Network, said the presence of several conservative figures at the meeting was a "really big deal", adding it "may be a signal that Obama's campaign is ready to break down the traditional wall of separation between conservatives and liberals when it comes to religious talk".

Mr Obama is aware that by supporting abortion and gay marriage he will prevent many religious conservatives from voting for him, but he nonetheless hopes that his "outreach" will help defuse the cultural conflict that has marked the US for several decades.

"Reaching out to the faith community is a priority for Barack Obama and will be a priority under an Obama administration. This is one of several meetings he will have over the coming months with religious leaders," said Obama campaign spokesman Jen Psaki.

He is however straying onto relatively friendly territory. For all his difficulties with his controversial former pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, the 46-year-old first-term senator he is known as a genuine, practising Christian.

His Republican rival for the White House, Senator John McCain, may be "pro-life" but is no darling of the Religious Right, whom he once called "agents of intolerance", and lacks the inspiration on other issues offered by Mr Obama. He is struggling to mobilize what is a key section of the Republican base to work on his behalf.

Growing numbers of influential evangelical leaders such as Rick Warren and Joel Hunter have addressed the need to depoliticize the movement, which from the late 1970s onwards became identified with the Republicans.

Evangelicals make up the biggest religious group in the country, with 26.3 of the population, while in a 2004 study 56 per cent described themselves as Republican.

Abortion and gay marriage have been regarded as non-negotiable issues, but more now see "whole of life" as more important, and have embraced causes such as climate change, Darfur and poverty, opening the door to voting for a candidate such as Mr Obama.

"Many of them have become very disillusioned with the Republican Party for the way they have been used. Their issues were raised in campaigns and not acted on," said Os Guinness, a leading evangelical scholar, adding that he once heard a senior White House staffer refer to evangelicals as "useful idiots".

"We are now seeing the end of the dominance of the Religious Right, the coalition that made it so powerful is breaking up," he said.

Mr Guinness, who has lived in the US for 20 years, recently launched an "evangelical manifesto" with seven other theologians condemning Christians on the Right and Left for "using faith" to express political views "without regard to the truth of the Bible".

Just looking at what this gent has said in the past...

Obama accuses Christian Right of hijacking faith 
By Klaus Marre 
Posted: 06/23/07 06:41 PM [ET] 
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) strongly criticized Christian conservatives Saturday, saying they had “hijacked” faith and are using it to drive a wedge between people.

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart,” Obama said at the United Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut.

The presidential candidate stated that the “so-called leaders of the Christian Right” have been “all too eager to exploit what divides us.

“At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design,” he said. “There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich. I don’t know what Bible they’re reading, but it doesn’t jibe with my version.”

Obama told his audience that he is getting a sense – after talking to Americans all across the country – that there is something missing in their lives.

“They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives,” he said. “They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them – that they are not just destined to travel down that long road toward nothingness.”

This feeling, he added, is what he experienced as a young community organizer in Chicago.

“Slowly, I came to realize that something was missing as well – that without an anchor for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone,” he said. Obama became a member of the United Church of Christ after his arrival in Chicago.

The senator called for the days to continue in which faith brought people together.

“So let’s rededicate ourselves to a new kind of politics – a politics of conscience,” ha said. “Let’s come together – Protestant and Catholic, Muslim and Hindu and Jew, believer and non-believer alike. We’re not going to agree on everything, but we can disagree without being disagreeable. We can affirm our faith without endangering the separation of church and state, as long as we understand that when we’re in the public square, we have to speak in universal terms that everyone can understand.” 

This is worthy of one of my trademark "Wowser" comments.  The plot thickens...

Curious.  I'm not sure this can be definitively answered, but I've heard it postulated that the residents in heaven can see us on earth.  Obviously God can without a doubt.  My questions, are are there windows of sorts between our world and theirs, or is that limited to God only.

Sincerely,
The MangoMan