What Being Pro Second Amendment Means

“What country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”

Thomas Jefferson
In a 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Second Amendment

“Though it is an unpopular opinion among the majority of gun owners the 2A is about killing people.  It’s about assaulting and destroying people, entities, and governments in a morally justified manner.

People that shy away from the term “assault weapon” aren’t doing the 2nd Amendment any favors. Arguing about terminology is something that started over half-a-century ago with the NRA. Assaulting -is- the entire point of the 2A. It’s not a hunting rifle, it’s not a sporting rifle, or a target rifle. It’s a tool meant for the justified killing of humans. Everything else is a secondary application. Stating anything else shifts the Overton Window away from the crux of the issue, which is stacking bodies when a government has gone rogue and is operating outside of its Constitutional boundaries.

Arguing that “AR stands for Armalite” is a win for the opposition. Quibbling about term “assault” in the Assault Weapons Ban bills is a win for the opposition. When someone says; “AR15’s need to be banned because they’re designed to kill people efficiently” don’t cuck yourself by arguing about feral hogs or shooting competitions. Respond with “yes. that’s the point.”

THAT is the difference between someone saying they’re Pro-gun and someone saying they’re Pro-2a. You can be Pro-gun and be fine with Red Flag Laws, AWBs, and Conceal Carry Permits. Those kind of people can also say, “I’m Pro-Gun! I hunt too, but we need common sense gun laws.” How many times have you heard that? Being Pro-2A has nothing to do with hunting or sporting, it’s about your God-given, inalienable, right to protect yourself, your family, your property, and your country from enemies both foreign and domestic with up to, and including, justifiable homicide with the best tools available. You have that right from birth, no matter where on Earth you’re born.

The 2A is just a piece of paper that recognizes and protects that right. All of that being said, rights aren’t devoid of responsibility. It’s more than “I believe in the 2A so I should own machine guns to magdump into trash!!” It doesn’t end with ownership of weapons, that’s just the start. You need to be training with them regularly, purposefully, and deliberately. To the pro-2A person, Guns aren’t toys, they’re life-ending tools to be taken seriously.

You need to find members of your local community that take it as seriously as you do, and train with those people regularly. If you can’t find anyone like that, you need to educate those around you and bring them to that level. It’s more than just owning the gun, It’s becoming a well-rounded minuteman. That’s what being pro2A means.”

Joshua Steinhauser
Son-in-Law

Responding to Pope Doug’s “Aside to the Actual Kinist Out There”

Pope Doug wrote a subsection titled;

An Aside to the Actual Kinists Out There

Since we are talking a lot about you guys, I thought it might be appropriate to take you aside for a minute. You all like to think of yourselves as the shock troops of the resistance, as an elite corps of hard-headed race realists. You are in fact the soft underbelly of the resistance.

Bret responds,

What marvelous providence that you have decided to take us aside because we’ve been meaning to take you aside also. This works out to be very convenient.

It is true that we like to think of ourselves as the last heroes of the West. It is glorious to contemplate that we are the descendants of Charles Martel at Tours and/or John Sobieski’s plumed knights fighting the Turks at Vienna as opposed to some armchair general who has been more full of himself than blood sausage for quite some time now.

But on to why we wanted to take you aside. We aren’t taking counsel from you Mr. Pope. We aren’t fooled by your mastery of the false dichotomy or the subtle contradictions. We aren’t impressed with your attempted impersonations of Ambrose Bierce, Chesterton, Mencken, or any other of your literary heroes. We see through your lifelong three card monte game. We know a grifter when we see one.

Frankly, we would rather be the soft underbelly of the resistance then a fifth columnist termite who honestly believes he is doing the Lord’s work. We are hopeful that even the soft underbelly of the resistance will be enough to resist your fifth columnist work. We admit that is not asking much but every little bit for the Kingdom helps. Soft underbellies of the world unite!

Pope Doug continues,

You are not the lost golden apples of the Hesperides in the true West. You are the crabbed fruit of the West, lying on the ground in one of our lower-IQ orchards, most of which fruit the ants have already carried off.

Bret responds,

Yeah, well, your Mother wore combat boots.

Take that!

Pope Doug,

If anyone on the right suddenly starts talking about the Jooozzz, and is sounding suspiciously like Ilhan Omar, the chances are outstanding that it is one of you guys.

Bret Responds,

Has Ilhan Omar along with the Kinists been channeling John Calvin again?

“…now, when, through nearly fifteen centuries, they (Jews) have been scattered and banished from their country, having no polity, by what pretext can they fancy, from the prophecy of Jacob, that a Redeemer will come to them? Truly, as I would not willingly glory over their calamity; so, unless they, being subdued by it, open their eyes, I freely pronounce that they are worthy to perish a thousand times without remedy.” 

John Calvin
(Commentary on Genesis 49:10)

“Primo meretur eorum perdita obstinatio et indomabilis, ut immensa miseriarum congerie sine fine et modo oppressi omnes exhilarent suis malis, nemo autem eorum misereatur.”

“First of all, their (Jew) depraved and indomitable obstinacy merits that none of them be pitied, as they all delight in their evils while being oppressed by a great mass of miseries without end or measure.”

John Calvin
RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS AND OBJECTIONS OF A CERTAIN JEW

Don’t you just hate it when Kinists start sounding like John Calvin?

Pope Doug writes,

The tweets in question in this case can sound so brave right after two in the morning, and also after two beers, right before you publish them, but when your opponents find those tweets and are consequently saying ohboyohboyohboyohboy to themselves, they are not doing this because they just plopped their lame arguments onto the sturdy slab of an oak table called the adamantine right. No, they actually found a two-dollar card table of the wobbly right, the kind that collapses as soon as they put any kind of weight on it. That’s why the ohboyohboyohboy reaction.

Bret responds,

Face it Doug… you’ve become a scaramouche. You’re more concerned about your reputation and your career than you are in speaking painful truths to the real enemies of Christendom.

“Anyway the wind blows
Doesn’t really matter 
To Doug…”

Listen Dude, if you ever had a spell on the White Boy Summer crowd it is gone. You are now like Merlin who has been imprisoned by the spell of Viviane. Your enchantment is lost on Gen. Y and most of Gen. Z. You will now live out the rest of your life serving as General to those who refused to fight the people who needed to be resisted the most.

Thank you for your earlier service. At one time many of us hoped that you would be the one who had the requisite midi-chlorian to lead but alas that has not been the case.

“The More in Common” Argument Coming From the Evangelical Left

Back in August it all started with the Pope of Moscow;

“I have more in common with a Nigerian Anglican Woman than with my conservative white pagan neighbor” 

Doug Wilson 
Blog & MehBlog

Yesterday on Twitter Andy Sandlin took it up;

“The white American Christian billionaire male has more in common with the poorest Christian sub-Saharan female than he does any of his unconverted countrymen.”

Andrew Sandlin
Twitter

And R. C. Sproul Jr, the Doyen of “being famous for being famous” agrees;

“Hard to believe anyone could question this. I guess those who do have this in common with the woke- believing demographic identity is greater than identity in Christ. Stay strong brother. “

R. C. Sproul Jr.
Responding to Doc Sandlin
Twitter

Clearly we are seeing a Gnostic theme gaining steam here. As such let’s examine this for a moment.

In our examination we will go with the humorous sarcastic lampooning side first. This from my friend Thomas Achord;

“Christianity trumps any marriage. The Christian husband has more in common with his neighbor’s Christian wife than he does with his own unconverted wife. Christian men and women should transcend their individual marriages and embrace the universal marriage ideal.”

Similarly we could add;

“Christianity trumps any parental arrangement. The Christian child has more in common with the Christian parents next door than he does with his own unconverted parents. Christian children should transcend their individual parentage arrangements and embrace the universal Christian parenting ideal, since, after all, they have more in common.”

Pressing on we could note how these statements by Wilson, Sandlin and Sproul 2.0 lack precision. Certainly we can all agree that as it pertains to eternal verities we have more in common with a Biblical Christian version of Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi than I have with my cousins who are outside of Christ. However, when it comes to every day matters like supporting a Burkean like social order, or longing for the good old days of Strom Thurmond’s “Dixiecrats,” or the preference for a good old country Fish Fry, or going Coon hunting or setting a trotline or attending a lecture on Great Southern Generals I suspect that I have more in common with the unbelieving good old boys of South Carolina who lived in the community I once Pastored then I do with Wilson, Sandlin, Sproul 2.0 and their ilk.

Think about it. If I were to draw a 90 mile radius with my congregation in the center I would have within that radius many Reformed Churches. I can guarantee you that except for abstract statements that comprise Biblical, Historical, and Systematic theology I would have much more in common with at least some of those Christ hating in that radius than I would many of those in “Reformed Churches.” Truth be told, I don’t find too much in common with “Reformed” Christians anymore as Iron Ink constantly testifies to.

Also down this line in order for me to talk about all that I have in common with any other Christian we better be defining what we mean by Christian. For example, the presumption of charity requires that I believe that Wilson, Sandlin, and Sproul 2.0 are all Christian but I clearly have a hard time finding common ground with these people. I mean, we would agree on any number of abstract theological statements but we are seeing that when it comes to the concrete — not so much. Or we could take the R2K “Reformed” church in Lansing Michigan. The presumption of charity requires I count the Pastor and staff there Christian but I guarantee you that I have even less in common with those people than I do Wilson, Sandlin, and Sproul 2.0. In point of fact, I think those people with their R2K are treasonous baseborn. But if I can make it into the gates of heaven by God’s grace alone so can they and so I count them Christians that I don’t have spit in common with. Similarly, we could talk about liberal Christian ministers who I used to gather with for confabs. Not much in common with those people either.

All this to say that to go around talking the way Wilson, Sandlin, and Sproul 2.0 talk demonstrates a lack of precision that is embarrassing for a minister and frankly, like it or not, in this environment it does come across as Gnostic and Cultural Marxist all at the same time.

To argue this way, is not to proclaim, contra Sproul 2.0, that I am claiming some common ground with the WOKE crowd over common ground with Wilson, Sandlin, and Sproul 2.0. The ironic fact of the matter is that it is Wilson, Sandlin and Sproul 2.0 who are sharing the common ground with the WOKE crowd. Both the WOKE crowd and the Christianity of Wilson, Sandlin, and Sproul 2.0 are screaming at people that nature either doesn’t exist or isn’t important. WOKE teaches that there is no such thing as nature. Wilson, Sandlin, Sproul 2.0 and their legion ilk are saying instead that grace destroys nature. They are in essence saying that once Christians are converted then who they were prior to being Christians, as considered according to who they were as God created them, is extinguished.

Maleness or Femaleness — In Christ gone.
Italian or Irish — In Christ gone.
Age — In Christ gone.
White, Yellow, Brown — In Christ Gone.

All of this passing as Christianity is not a great deal different from what we did in High School at a party when we emptied every kind of alcohol we could find into one container in order to chug it down.

As I recall, we called that drink, “A suicide.”

Christianity & Civil Liberty

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Gen. 1:1

You alone are the LORD. You created the heavens, the highest heavens with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to all things, and the host of heaven worships You. Neh. 9:6

The Scripture teaches here that God is. This of course immediately means that materialism, which teaches that God isn’t, is not true. It is this simple truth that God is that leads to so much when it comes to this issue of Christian Liberty/Freedom.

The fact “God is” answers the question; “Why is it that only Christianity can support social orders that can be described as genuinely having liberty.”

And the answer to that is it is only Christianity that provides the religious and ideological framework wherein liberty can be nurtured. It is only Christianity that consistently repudiates the notion of materialism that is so prevalent in the West.

Read your dystopian novels and the one thing you see consistent about them is that the dystopia being described has no place for a personal extra-mundane spiritual being. In brief they are materialistic. When you have materialism for your worldview — when you deny the God of the Bible then only humanist force can provide the principle of order and regulated or ordered liberty as informed by transcendent non-material truth is crushed. Sisley Huddleston caught this in his little record called “France; The Tragic Years.” Huddleston wrote,

Not only had Russia fallen a victim to the conception of a purely materialist universe, in which force alone counted, not only had Russia become a vast prison in which all the liberties of which we were wont to boast were suppressed, in which a group of men, sitting in the Kremlin, had forged a system of terrorism, of totalitarianism, dependent on an army of police and spies, but outside Russia, in almost every country, the missionaries of Bolshevism had made large numbers of converts.

Sisley Huddleston

A generation prior to Huddleston the great Christian theologian and Churchmen J. Gresham Machen could write touching also on the relation to materialism and liberty;

“Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.”

J. Gresham Machen
Christianity & Liberalism

Materialism is the wench mother of all slave orders because materialism is the idea that all that is, is matter and that a personal extra-mundane God does not exist. This materialism in turn leads to the civil bondage that Huddleston speaks of as being directed by “force alone” and Machen doubts, that where present, the remnants of liberty can subsist.Where materialism gains footing then humans are just matter in motion and have no significant meaning. As such the idea that little instantiations of matter in motion should have freedom or liberty is irrelevant to those who see themselves as bringing in the materialist Utopia.

In the kind of world where there is no being who is situated in or relating to a region beyond the material world to whom we will all one day be answerable and to whom alone can provide order, meaning, and definition by His revelation the only option left is Orwell’s boot stamping on a face forever.

So, here we see the connection between spiritual freedom and civil freedom. Men who are in rebellion against God are in bondage to themselves as their own gods. The consequence is the bondage that they have in themselves they translate into everything they touch. Men in spiritual bondage create social orders that are characterized by the killing of liberty and so civil bondage.

R. J. Rushdoony says much the same;

“Society changes only as the members of society change, only as men and women are regenerated by Jesus Christ. Apart from regeneration, a society can have some material progress, but no real advantage or freedom for most men as a rule. The areas of freedom have been the areas of Christian faith, and, as that faith wanes, freedom wanes….

Freedom has only come to a people, as they have become, one by one, free men in Jesus Christ. As a people advance into freedom in Christ, they move their society and country into that freedom, and as a people drift into unbelief and sin, their country declines into slavery.”

R. J. Rushdoony

… as a people drift into unbelief and sin, their country declines into slavery.”

And that is because spiritual slavery translates into civil bondage.

One more from a different voice so that you can see that there is a wide testimony supporting my contention that spiritual bondage always leads to civil bondage. This one from the masterful wordsmith Malcolm Muggeridge;

People, that is to say, are never enslaved unless they have become slaves already. They swim into the Great Leviathan’s mouth (a reference to the Statist Tyrant) He does not need to chase them.”

Malcolm Muggeridge

Farewell to Freedom?

So how can we summarize so far as to the last two weeks?

We have noted that only Christianity can support liberty and this is because only Christianity gives us a extra-mundane personal God who has made Himself and His will known so that we have an authority outside of us by which we can know what ordered-liberty looks like.

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible

We have noted that absent this what the West has, generally speaking, adopted are forms of Materialism. Materialism insists that man is not made in the image of God but rather is just matter in motion. Man therefore has no intrinsic value that has to be honored by those who have captured social-orders as gods to run the social order to the end of building a Utopia. Man having no intrinsic value has no need to be given liberty/freedom as authorized and defined by God.

As such all social orders where men are in spiritual bondage will result in civil bondage as sure as night follows day.

Though civil bondage may be the rule, genuine Christians who have been set free from their sin and misery can never have their spiritual freedom/liberty taken away. Their sin no longer masters them and so they are free indeed.

The only thing that can reverse civil bondage is Reformation characterized by heralding Jesus Christ. Political rallies, activism and/or voting campaigns have their place as a “hold my beer” kind of rear guard action. They are useful in delaying the tyrant but they can never of themselves usher in civil order freedom because they are dealing with symptoms and not the disease.

Listen to RJR in support of that statement;

The ballot box has a very important function in a free society, but it can never be expected to do anything more than to reflect the character, the desires, and the will of the people. If the people who vote are of weak or bad character, if their desires are larcenous and envious, and if their will be perverse and evil, the election results will merely reflect their own nature on a broader scope.
This means too that people who expect to reform the state or country by means of the vote, by elections, are headed for failure and disillusionment. Reformation must begin in the lives of the people in order to show up in the ballot box.

RJR

Elsewhere he noted;

Freedom is not a natural fact but a religious principle, and the decline of Freedom is an aspect of the rise of false faiths, false forms of “Christianity,” as well as other varieties of faith…. For all too long, those who have believed the most have been Marxists, Keyensians, fascists, and humanists generally. Their ‘freedom’ has been slavery, for ‘the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel (Prov. 12:10)…. If Christians lose their freedom, they will only have themselves to blame, and their indifference to the Author of true liberty, the Lord our King.

RJR
Roots of Reconstruction — pg. 55

Written in 1980

However, let us say again that where spiritual freedom begins to multiply in a social order there you can be sure that civil order freedom will soon follow. This is in defiance to R2K reasoning who wants to suggest that though men can be spiritually free their spiritual freedom dare not translate into the civil realm breathing Christian defined liberty into all social order institutions. How do I know this? They tell us.

“I asked David Van Drunen a question that I believe goes right to the heart of this issue. I asked him what God would think of a nation whose magistrate and people had become overwhelmingly (and sincerely) Christian, and who decided to confess Christ in the common realm, in the formerly secular realm. I asked if God would be displeased with that, and Van Drunen said yes, he thought God would be displeased with that. “

Doug Wilson

Talk about the problem of fifth columnists.

Let us add something here. Of course all of this is worldview warfare. Materialism vs. Christianity;

Bertrand Russell has not exaggerated in summing up the present significance of Marxism somewhat as follows: dialectical materialism is God; Marx the Messiah; Lenin and Stalin the apostles; the proletariat the elect; the Communist party the Church; Moscow the seat of Church; the Revolution the second coming; the punishment of capitalism hell; Trotsky the devil; and the communist commonwealth kingdom come.”

― Robert A. Nisbet

The Quest For Community: A Study In The Ethics Of Order And Freedom

So, yes it can be argued that the Scriptures are primarily about how God has provided the means for fallen man to be rescued from their sin and misery. Yes, the Scriptures are primarily about the finished work of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it can even be said that the Scripture weren’t written primarily to be a cookbook that if followed will give you your “best life now.”

However, having admitted all that we would still say that if people are indeed rescued by so great a salvation Scripture also teaches that people who embrace the whole of Christianity are a people who thirst for ordered liberty in their personal life, their family lives, their church lives, their community lives and their social-order lives.

Christians who are content with civil order bondage should be thought of as being either immature Christians or not Christians at all. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

Conclusion:

 

“The Scriptures clearly teach that human government is of divine ordination and does not have its origin in any social compact or contract, as Hobbes and Locke taught, nor was it created by man himself to meet the needs of his society. Rather does Christian theism insist that government was ordained of God for man and that its just powers come from Him and not from man. Government is not ordained primarily to defend human liberty but to ensure that kind of society necessary for man to carry out those duties which he owes to God alone.”

C. Gregg Singer

We would only add that any society where man is free to carry out those duties which he owes to God alone is a society that is defined by regulated freedom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

McAtee Examines George Will’s Conservative Bonafides

“You have exalted yourself against the Lord of heaven…”

Daniel 5
Daniel Addressing Belshazzar 

“But a free market economic system is a system. It is a public product, a creation of government. Any important structure of freedom is a structure, a complicated institutional and cultural context that government must nurture and sustain. Obviously, free speech is not free in the sense that it is free of prerequisites. It is not free of a complicated institutional frame. Free speech, as much as a highway system is something government must establish and maintain,” and so on and on.

A welfare state is certainly important to and probably indispensable to social cohesion and, hence, to national strength. A welfare state is implied by conservative rhetoric. A welfare state can be an embodiment of a wholesome ethic of common provision.”

George Will 
In Defense of the Welfare State — 1983

1.) Note first that Will has always been cast by the Mainstream media as a Conservative. This reveals that 35 years ago Conservatism was a joke. How much more so now? Thoughtful Christians have to realize that in terms of the political spectrum in this country we have no dog in the fight. Our dog died in 1861.

2.) Note also that the free market is not only a creation of the (presumably Federal) Government, per Will, but the free market being the creation of the Government it is up to the Government to nurture and sustain this thing that the Government has created. The whole idea of Creation, Sustaining and Governing used to be ascribed, in systematic theology, to God’s providence. Will has replaced the Christian God with the state as God walking on the earth. The State is the creator, sustainer, and governor. Man is Plato’s political animal.

3.) If a free market economic system is a ‘creation of Government’ then how is it the case that it is ‘Free market?” If it is a creation of the Government then why not refer to it as the “Government market?”

4.) Will is presupposing the old fascist line of ‘everything inside the state, nothing outside the state.’ Will has posited that the State is the overall conditioning environment in which man lives, moves, breathes and has his being. Of course, the fascists got that idea from Hegel who got it from Aristotle and Plato. No Biblical Christian can abide this horse manure thinking from the “conservative” George Will.

Increasingly, one is hearing the modernist clergy bleat about how politics does not belong in the pulpit. This quote proves that the pulpit cannot help but be political. When our wisemen, politicians, talking heads, and cultural gatekeepers arise to denounce God’s sovereignty how can the pulpit not sing out in defiance of all such pagan thinking? For the pulpit to remain mute in light of the claim that the Government is God walking on the earth would be to abandon the calling to be salt and light, it would be to go all treasonous at the very moment when faithfulness is most desperately needed, as done on a large scale it would be the end of Institutional Biblical Christianity. The pulpit must be political because politics is increasingly seeking to muscle in on the bailiwick of the pulpit. Ministers who refuse to thwap pagan thinking upside the head when pagan thinking is seeking to mold the thinking of God’s people are either stupid or cowards.

Modern conservatism is just right-wing Hegelianism.