Welcome the Franken Family

They had only read books that had described families that were quite clearly altogether different than clan Franken. Those books were usually the history books that described a less enlightened age when family units were morphologically the same and would suffer from a bland longevity wherein family units stayed together for decades.

That was the time before researchers had discovered that true satisfaction could only be discovered in a rotating pleroma of family members.

The Franken’s were just such an example of such a family. Gathered around the table for the Martin Luther King Holiday the Franken’s were recognized throughout the community as being the poster children for what destiny had always intended for the family to be. Father Franken (Shelby) was born with two left arms but due to the work of the Handicapper General of the United States (a new cabinet position established in 3066) he had risen to be a professional athlete and Captain on a all right-handed girls volleyball team.

While during his time on the Volleyball team, Shelby had met, wooed, and finally had a child with Terry. Terry, standing 4′ 2″ was one of the stars of the Sarasota Spikes — a team which was a member of the multigenerational, multigendered, multiracial “National Organization Uniting Volleyballers Each Advancing Uniformity (NOVEAU).” The league was not so constricted so as to compete only in Volleyball. Many years they would spend half the season competing against an All-Start Rugby team from the United Arab Emirates — who of course had ceased being uniquely Arab centuries ago. Terry made the team because of the Handicapper General’s rules that Volleyball teams were required to have an equal number of people under 5 feet as they had people playing for them who were over 6 feet.

Shelby and Terry didn’t particularly like each other when they first met, but on the one weekend a year where they were required, by league rules to cohabitate with one another, they discovered they disliked each other less than they disliked everyone else on the team. As such true love was inevitable.

Shelby’s original last name was Fran. Terry’s original last name was Kenn. As such their “married” name was “Franken.”

Of course, Shelby and Terry were never really married. Marriage was one of those ancient vestiges from “the way things used to be.” However, they did have children. Turns out that both Shelby and Terry were quite fertile. Shelby ended up birthing 3 of the children, while Terry birthed four of the children. Neither Shelby, nor Terry, were certain who the original sperm donators of their children were but as that was a custom long disregarded neither one cared.

Naturally, other children had been adopted by Shelby and Terry. Indeed, there were times when the joke was that there were no children who weren’t adopted by Shelby and Terry — such was their magnificent generosity. Shelby and Terry loved all children the same, yet despite all this love Shelby and Terry had been taken to court several times by children unknown to them claiming that they had a need that Shelby and Terry didn’t meet, and as such Shelby and Terry were involved in child abuse. Fortunately, on these cases the US Handicapper General would often step in to rescue Shelby and Terry’s good name by writing a check from the US Government for the well being of the children bring suit in the name of Shelby and Terry Franken.

Five of the “biological” children were vertically challenged like Terry. Three of the seven were born with two left hands. Two of them (Norm and Norma) were miserable birth defects being neither short nor blessed with the absence of right arms. Despite these birth defects Norm and Norma were treated as part of the family.

In later years Norm and Norma made up for their birth defects by having children together. When that happened they were never considered abnormal again.

It should be noted here that Shelby and Terry had not been the only parents of this anti-family family. The whole Volleyball team had rotated in out of the bedroom that had been originally claimed by Shelby and Terry.  One of the things that made the Franken Family so admired was that it was so undefinable. Even the children didn’t know completely what it meant to be a member of the Franken Family.

One thing that the whole family had in common was the same pigment skin color. One of the requirement of NOVEAU was that pigment be of a very particularly mottled character. In such a fashion NOVEAU reasoned that they could broaden their appeal while at the same time serving as an example of the necessity for all colors to bleed into one. Indeed, so strict was the NOVEAU League on this rule that any fan attending a game also had to have mottled skin pigment.

One thing that NOVEAU emphasized was the elimination of distinctions since distinctions were the reason for all disharmony and hard feelings in the world. This policy explained why NOVEAU was not just about volleyball. Indeed, anyone attending a NOVEAU match were not exactly sure just what they would be spectators of. Sometimes, it was certain to be Volleyball, while at other times it could be rugby, shuttlecock, darts, or fencing, or even some combination of all the above. At those times the rules that would be followed were called “Watterson-ball” rules, named after the first President of the League — Bill Watterson.

If they had lived in 2020 Shelby and Terry and the children would have been called “Cross-dressers” but since all distinctions everywhere had been eliminated there was no way to know what cross-dressing would look like. Shelby enjoyed the skorts while Terry was a big fan of the Kilt. (They used to call them “Scottish Kilts”) but the whole notion of “Scott” had long been lost.

Being stars in the NOVEAU league Shelby and Terry traveled extensively and they were constantly amazed to occasionally come across locations where distinctions still existed. These poor people lived as social outcasts considered as the derelicts of society. Despite all the global and local peer pressure these offscourings of the planet marshalled on determined that the now obsolete categories of gender, race, ethnicity, and intelligence mattered.

Shelby and Terry were of course “Christians,” though they often commented to one another that they didn’t see much difference between themselves and the other members of their Volleyball team who were not “Christians.” It certainly wasn’t something that anybody spent any time talking about. After all, if faith has to know its place, and the place for faith certainly wasn’t on a table tennis court.

Shelby and Terry had learned their faith from an early age. They had been dedicated as infants and from the tenderest of years they had been members of “Most Conservative Presbyterian Church Possible in the World (MCPCP)” There they were catechized how God found it blasphemous to even think in terms of gender, age, race, intellect, or ability. Before they could speak they were taught that being a Christian means being saved from nature and entering into the grace world where the carnal distinctions invented by man are forever eliminated into an ocean of God’s great undiscriminating love for everything and everyone.

Indeed, for Shelby and Terry their Christian faith meant everything to them, although they had a hard time understanding how there was a time when Christians would have condemned Shelby and Terry for being not true to Christ or the Christian faith just because they were intersexed queers who were pressing the Crown Rights of King Jesus to eliminate antiquated notions of marriage, family, nation, gender, race, intelligence, and age.

Still, Shelby and Terry just knew in their hearts that they were doing the King’s work and they were resolved that together via their work with NOVEAU, they would stamp out the remaining bigotry that remained in this sin sick world of God blaspheming distinctions.

Andy Sandlin says; “Christianity Erases Racial Identity.” Don’t be like Andy

“Racial identity is incompatible w/ the Christian Gospel. The Gospel was created partly to overcome racial identity. The Gospel was created to forge religious identity.”

Andy Sandlin

1.) Sentence #1 explains thus why Jesus had to be descended from David.

2.) Is Jesus, who is now at the Right hand of the Father, no longer to be referred to as “The Lion of the Tribe of JUDAH?”

3.) The Gospel was created in order so that the Ethiopian could no longer be used hypothetically as one who could not change his skin?

4.) How can it possibly be the case that given this view that Christianity is not pure on Gnosticism? Seems the Manicheans were correct after all.

5.) More of the modern Gospel that teaches that grace destroys nature. Once you love yourself some Jeebus you no longer are “Red or Yellow, Black or White, because after all you’re all the same in God’s sight.”

6.) Since the Gospel was forged to create religious identity clearly we can also do away with biological gender identity since it must be the case that if the Gospel was created to overcome racial identity it must also be the case whereupon the Gospel was created to over come gender identity.

Honestly, I am left absolutely gob-smacked that this man could have his own wife listening to him, never mind having scads of people hang on his every word.

And he, as well as those who share this opinion, are not that uncommon among those reputed to be pillars in the Church.

Dr. Andrew Sandlin’s Warning About the Second Coming of Lincolnian Nationalism

“I think the problem with Christian nationalism in its most prominent iterations is that it’s essentially the positing of an ethno-state bound together by kinship, presided over largely by concentrated political order with a formal Christian profession. That’s certainly not the same thing as Joe mentions as biblical nationhood, and it’s certainly not Christian culture. I think we need to understand that, proximately, the greatest enemy in Western culture is statism, and we don’t need a revived Christianized statism (which is oxymoronic) to replace that.

I think we need to Christianize culture in all areas of life. I’ll say finally, I think one problem is that because Christians have been so culturally derelict for the last 150 years—they have lost in culture, lost in politics, lost everywhere—now in a mad panic, say, we must capture politics in order to impose a Christian vision. I don’t think that they understand that the left did not first win politics, the left won culture over last 100 or 150 years. And we will not win the culture back simply by gaining political victories, though getting good Christians in political office is certainly desirable. So, this is basically a cultural battle. Christian nationalism sees it as a political battle and that is a dangerous miscalculation.”

Andy Sandlin

1.) Sandlin speaks of “CN in its most prominent iterations.” I want to know the names of those individual CN out there who believe that CN is what Sandlin is saying they believe CN is. I demand this because I seriously doubt very many of the major CN thinkers and advocates out there define CN has primarily political. Sandlin here has given us a genuine example of the red herring fallacy.

I will speak only for myself that this has never been my vision of Christian Nationalism and that in point of fact any Christian Nationalism that would be “presided over largely by concentrated political order,” could not be in any way taken as a serious establishment of Christian Nationalism.

It seems the Boomers like Sandlin have this fixated image in their head that all us Christian Nationalists desire the second coming of the Abraham Lincoln’s Nationalizing of America. It is just asinine that any Christian would have to say to Andy, “No, Andy, I do not desire the second coming of  Lincoln’s Nationalism. How could you be so stupid to think I would want that?”

2.) Having said that, what is the problem with “the positing of an ethno-state bound together by kinship, presided over largely by concentrated political order with a formal Christian profession.” as long as that non-concentrated political order is a reflection of a Christian culture. Sandlin knows that no Christian worth is salt is going to advocate for a concentrated (read centralized) Christian political order. In point of fact a concentrated political order would not be Christian Nationalism because such an arrangement is not particularly Christian. However, a non-concentrated political order — a political order that is diffused and decentralized — could indeed be Christian and I would be shocked to learn the movers and shakers out there supporting CN would say anything other.

Oh sure… there are some crackpots around who wet their pants over visions of some kind of version of Lincoln’s Marxists.

3.) It is completely bogus on Sandlin’s part to suggest that CN believe that it is a political battle vis-a-vis understanding that it is also a cultural battle. However, though politics is indeed downstream of culture, it is also at the same time part and parcel of culture so it cannot be ignored in the way that Andy as, in the past, suggested.

4.) Really, in my estimation, the thing that really blisters Andy’s chaps is the perfectly Biblical idea of CN “positing of an ethno-state bound together by kinship.” However, Andy is just going to have to get over this. As we have noted ad nauseum here nations are merely family writ large. Nations by their very definition have a ethnic core that cannot be negotiated w/o losing the whole concept of “nation.” Christian Nationalists merely desire that their blood informed nations (just as their blood informed family units) be defined and animated by Christian categories. There is nothing startling/shocking in this idea of Nationalism.

However, Andy has sipped from the grog that is the spirit of the age and, like Doug Wilson and so many other evangelicals who have bellied up to the bar of the zeitgeist, he and they just can’t hold his or their liquor.

Michael Hoffman Exposes Doug Wilson’s Inane Take on Israel

I don’t often make a link the center of something I post here but this is an exception.

People here, are not surprised to read me saying again that I have significant problems with Doug Wilson. I have often said that I wish I could buy Doug for what he is worth and turn around and sell him for what he thinks he is worth. The problem isn’t what Doug knows. He knows a good deal for which he should be extolled. The problem is what Doug thinks he knows but just isn’t so.

Many people take Doug as a cornucopia of encyclopedic wisdom. Those people who make Doug their “go-to guy” are themselves exercising all the wisdom of a duck flying in to land next to a decoy. There are those who will merely see envy in my observations regarding Doug. All I can say to that is that it isn’t true. Were Doug orthodox I would be doing cartwheels and being his chief cheerleader. I would urge people to move to Moscow. I would slay all those who rise up against him. But… people will say what they will all because I point our Doug’s errors and lamentable inconsistencies.

Here is a huge error of Doug’s pointed  out by someone else who has done the legwork.

https://michaelhoffman.substack.com/p/churchianitys-support-for-israeli

The errors in Wilson’s thinking that are pointed out here are just embarrassing and if it was anyone else besides Wilson it would go a long way towards ruining their credibility across the board. However, Doug has gained that “Teflon” ability and so his groupies will just shrug off the truths that Michael Hoffman reveals.

Read Hoffman’s piece and let me know what you think in the comments.

Dr. Mike Horton Bearing False Witness Against Thornwell & Dabney

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/white-horse-inn/id356920632?i=1000635315098

12:20-14:40 “Machen was flawed” regarding his racial views. “Dabney and Thornwell, the two main Southern theologians, they argued throughout their systemic theologies, their anthropology incorporated racism. Africans are inherently less human. And there were a lot of pro-slavery people who didn’t articulate those theological views, but they did. Leading Southern Presbyterian theologians. Machen never argued that. And moreover Machen showed that even though he didn’t make theological arguments for it, that he thought socially it was wrong. My thing is Dabney and Thornwell have nothing to say to the broader church today… Once you weave those kinds of godless doctrines into theology, it bleeds into soteriology, ecclesiology, eschatology. I think we just have to say the theological systems of Dabney and Thornwell should be considered moribund in our tradition. Different from Machen. So why not Christianity and Liberalism too? Because Christianity and Liberalism, nor any of Machen’s writings, sought to make theological arguments. He was frankly sociologically racist. But he didn’t undergird it with theological heresy. That’s why I would say there’s a different between somebody like Dabney and Thornwell and somebody like Machen.”

Mike Horton
White Horse Inn

Now, I’ve read a good deal of Dabney. Far less of Thornwell, but still more than your average clergy critter. There may be places where Dabney and Thornwell say what Horton insists that they said but I for one would like to have those quotes cited instead of just having to believe Horton, who has shown himself in the past to be more than able to get matter wrong. So, I concede it is possible that Dabney and Thornwell said things that communicated that “African are inherently less human,” but if they did I want the proof of that. I want the quotes. So, Mike, lets see the quotes that prove your statement because absent those quotes you need to shut your pie-hole.

I want the proof of that because I have quotes from Dabney and Thornwell that prove they most certainly did not believe that. For example;

“The Negro is one blood with ourselves — that he has sinned as we have, and that he has has an equal interest with us in the great Redemption. Science, falsely so called, may attempt to exclude him from the brotherhood of humanity…. but the instinctive impulses of our nature combined with the plainest declaration of the Word of God, lead us to recognize in his form and lineaments — his moral, religious, and intellectual nature — the same humanity in which we glory as the image of God. We are not ashamed to call him our brother.”

Dr. James Henley Thornwell
Sermon — Rights and Duties of Masters

Does that sound like Thornwell is saying that the African is inherently less human than whites? I mean the man explicitly says that “the Negro is one blood with ourselves.”  The quote, taken as a whole, completely testifies that Horton is bearing false witness against a Father in the faith. Now, maybe Horton has some quotes wherein Thornwell contradicts himself here. If so, let Horton reproduce those quotes. Only be doing so can Horton be cleared of bearing false witness. Without said quotes demonstrating Horton’s allegation Horton needs to either publicly repent or failing that, be brought up on charges.

Now as to Dabney we read from his pen,

“… While we believe that “God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens,” we know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated from the white man by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of genus. Hence the offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race… incapable of the career of civilization and glory as an independent race. And this apparently is the destiny which our conquerors have in view. If indeed they can mix the blood of the heroes of Manassas with this vile stream from the fens of Africa, then they will never again have occasion to tremble before the righteous resistance of Virginia freemen; but will have a race supple and vile enough to fill that position of political subjection, which they desire to fix on the South?

R. L. Dabney
A Defense of Virginia & the South

Again, Horton may have quotes from Dabney from his systematic theology wherein Dabney contradicts himself. Note here that Dabney writes that;

1.) The African belongs to the nations that God made of one blood to dwell upon the earth. This contradicts Horton’s claim that Dabney believed that “African were inherently less human.”

2.) When Dabney speaks of the African as a “different fixed species of the race,” he is again affirming that Africans are human. Different does not mean “inherently less human.”

3.) Anybody who knows the history of tribal Africa blinks not a whit at the description of “vile stream from the fens of Africa.” One could easily imagine Cortez describing the “vile stream from the fens of the Aztecs,” or Moses describing the “vile stream from the fens of Canaan.”

4.) As much as the R2K Gnostic Mike Horton might find the Dabney quote he nowhere here says that Africans are inherently less human. Indeed, he admits they are human by noting the one blood concept. He merely recognizes there are vast differences between the African race and the white man.

So again, Dr. Horton, or anybody who would like to defend Horton, please do us a favor and provide the Thornwell and Dabney quotes that proves that they thought the African was inherently less human.

One more thing here before I sign off. This statement by Horton is breathtaking in its absolute idiocy;

“Because Christianity and Liberalism, nor any of Machen’s writings, sought to make theological arguments.”

I’m pretty confident that Machen would be surprised to learn that in none of his writings was he seeking to make theological arguments. This statement is nothing but dumbassery on Horton’s part.

In conclusion, I hope I live long enough to see the day when the theological system of Horton will be taken as completely moribund and when in Seminaries Horton is held up as a negative example of doing theology much the way that Charles Grandison Finney is mocked today as a theologian in Reformed seminaries.