[Granville-Hough] 27 Feb 2009 - Forbidden Fruit

[Trustees and Executors for Granville W. Hough]

    One of our young ministers had a sermon several years ago on Adam
and Eve, which
was incomprehensible to me.  He was the one who believed God created
Heaven and Earth in seven 24 hour days.
    To summarize, Eve was deceived by Sir Snake, but Adam had his eyes
wide open; when Eve offered him the forbidden fruit. From there, the
minister wandered off into theological fantasy.
    Now, the current Wahabi (Muslim) version is that man was and is a
perfect being, being made in the image of God; but woman was and is
imperfect, doomed to offer forbidden
fruit hither and yon.  Hence you keep her covered up and out of sight,
helping God with the tasks of restraining her driving, voting, running 
for political office and other forms of gross sinning.
    There is still another version from the East Texas swoonies who
rushed forward to the stages at Elvis Presley's performances at his age
of 19 at Texas high schools.  When a puzzled teacher asked the young 
females why they did it, they replied they wanted "some of that 
forbidden fruit."  (At least, they had heard the story of Eve, and 
understood its relationship to their raging hormones. I'm sure they are 
all conservative Republican grandmas by now.).

PS.  With regard to the origin of the German Ahrendorfs/Ohrendorfs, I
recalled that families of this name came to New York state from "The
Palatinate" as religious refuges, and later I found the same names in
Pennsylvania and in the Shenandoah Valley of VA, and I know some of
these came from Alsace.  These migrations were from 1710 to 1750,
certainly before the Revolutionary War.  Few places on earth have a more
turbulent history for the past 500 years that that area of the Rhine
River.  What the areas were called changed every few years.  The
Arenders are about like "Little Abner Yokum" (from Joachim) as to the
origin of their name.  They had no German tradition, though they did
claim Huguenot French heritage from the Hartleys through the Bowens,
from the other side of their family.  I should have said that if the
Ahrendorfs/Ohrendorfs are indeed our line, they most likely came from 
some small duchy or region near or along the Rhine River.

PPS.  Jeweline Richardson, wife of John of San Diego, called my 
attention to the 24 Feb announcement of the CA Alzheimer's Association 
that by 2030 the number of Alzheimer's patients in CA would increase to 
1.1 million.  The cause: the aging of the baby boomers.  (One might 
conclude that post-WW II was indeed a time of raging hormones.  On good 
days, I seem to remember something like that.)