The Libertarianism of the Tuttle Twins Put On Display and Slain — A Presuppositional Reading of “Fate of the Future”

Just finished reading “Tuttle Twins: The Fate of the Future,” to two of my Grandsons.

The Tuttle Twins are becoming increasingly popular among Biblical Christian homeschoolers. All I can say after reading my first Tuttle Twins book is that parents better be ruddy well careful. This volume is toxic.

1.) It reduces ultra Libertarian Murray Rothbard’s “Anatomy of the State” to a child’s level.

2.) On the first two pages you find pictures of different races of peoples in a kind of multicultural setting.

3.) A quote from the book;

“Over time, these societies have created cultures — different foods, clothes, music, language, and religions.”

The problem with the above quote is that it is false that societies create cultures and it is false that societies create religions. In point of fact, it is Religion and People groups (as theology is poured over ethnicity) that create religions and then the culture that flowers is but the outward manifestation of a people’s religion and ethnicity. This Tuttle Twins book as it backwards. Culture is always downstream of religion. Sans the Tuttle Twin religion is NOT downstream of culture.

4.) Another quote from the book lifted from Rothbard

“The state is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.”

Certainly, this is likely true of any non-Christian state. However, this would not be how a Christian would define a state in a Godly Christian order. In a Christian order the state is not necessarily negative. In a Christian order the state is the means by which God brings order into a designed and very limited jurisdiction in concert with other governments in other jurisdictions in the same society. The Libertarian definition above of the State casts the State in a purely negative sense and pushes the reader (remember) towards a anarcho-capitalist type of position.

5.) Another quote;

“Most people in charge of the State want to do good things and help people — they’re not trying to be bad like gangsters.”

If the last quote above was overly negative in defining the State this quote is downright Pollyanna laughable. No child in any Christian home should be taught that kind of tripe. Children need to be told that the current State and the people in charge of the current State want to do harm and hazard to the American citizen and that the current people in charge of the State make gangsters look like Boy Scouts.

6.) Another quote;

“But these governments tend to always expand their power. Instead of just protecting the people, they begin controlling them and limiting what they can do.”

I thoroughly agree that it is a significant injurious problem that governments tend to always expand their power. However, the problem in the quote above arises with the intimation that it is always wrong for “governments to control and limit the population in what they can do.” The presupposition undergirding this statement is that the individual is sovereign and should not be controlled or limited in any way. Biblical governments, for example, should control and limit the population in what they can do if the population desires to do those things that are contrary to God’s Law Word. For the Libertarian authors of the Tuttle Twins the individual is sovereign. For the Biblical Christian God’s Law-Word is sovereign and because it is sovereign the government may well have to control and limit the population in what they can do.

7.) Another quote;

“Chief Ron says it’s never okay to use force in aggression, only in defense.”

This is the Libertarian cornerstone maxim called “the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP).” Of course it is utter nonsense. There are times when using force in aggression is required by God in his assignment to the government. For example, a Godly government would use force in aggression to put pornographers out of business. For example, a Godly government would use force in aggression against those who provide abortion.

The NAP prevents rectification of past crimes or injustices, so long as the original criminal has transferred the proceeds of his iniquity to someone else. In such cases those who have profited by ill-gotten booty can not have aggression visited upon them because their gain did not occur as a result of their aggression.

8.) Another Quote

“We’re people with rights just like them.”

Space does not allow to go into the details of all that is wrong with the “human rights” language. For our purposes here the Biblical Christian is more comfortable talking about the rights that arise out of and are a consequence of human duties laid upon us by the God of the Bible. Technically speaking, only God has right. People have duties. If we want to speak of “human rights” we better be very exacting in tracing those rights back to the authority of God’s word while at the same time demonstrating how if men will do their duty unto God the proper human rights will be the consequence.

9.) Another quote;

“‘The state is one type of government — but in society there are other types (of government) that don’t use coercion’, Mrs. Tuttle added. ‘Our family even has a a government.'”

Though it is not said explicitly the intimation here seems to be that the family is a government that doesn’t use coercion. A Biblical Christian still believes that the rod of correction is a proper instrument for parents. However, it is altogether believable to me that some true blue Libertarians would say parents using coercion are in error.

10.) Another quote;

“But ideally the government would persuade you to do business with them Rather than bullying people, they would have to be very nice and fair, just like the businesses we shop at every day. They would do their best to serve their customers.”

Here we see blatant in your face humanism. Notice the God of this system is the demands and desires of the customers. The customers and their demands and desires becomes the norm that norms all norms. However, what if the customer wants those things that God’s Law disallows? Should the government be very nice and fair and provide the customer those things? For the twins in the Tuttle home it is the desire of the consumer that is the lodestone by which all is governed. This is just humanism.

11.) Another quote:

“You know, there’s a name for this concept … it’s called polycentric law — when two or more governments compete in the same jurisdiction.”

If the previous quote was humanism on display this quote advocates polytheism. Keep in mind that law is always a reflection of some God or god concept. If there are many law centers in one social order that can only be as a result of many gods in one social order. Polycentric law requires polytheism. And for Libertarianism the god behind the different gods of polytheism would be the consumers (see #10 above) who choose which law (and so God) they prefer. There would be as many law systems and gods in one social order as there are consumers who prefer to be ruled by these differing polycentric law systems and polytheistic gods.

 

Four Simple Arguments Why Baptists Are Wrong About Baptism

1.) Following the conviction that there is no such thing as neutrality  we Biblical Christians understand that if we do not baptize our children we are then presuming either they are not sinners and so have no need of the sign and seal of the washing of regeneration or we are presuming that our babies do indeed belong to their Father the devil and so are counted seed for Lucifer. Holding to neither of these presumptions, we presume, following Scripture, a charity regarding our children’s covenant identity and so following Scripture we baptize our children as God’s children.

2.) Infant Baptism is consistent with the proclamation that salvation is by faith alone through grace alone. The paedo-Baptists are consistent here. The Creedo-Baptists are not. The creedo-baptist by demanding an ability of a covenant child to confess Christ before he or she can be baptized is denying faith alone through grace alone because whatever the confessing creedo-Baptist person is bringing to Baptism that the covenant infant paedo-Baptist cannot bring (because they are an infant) is the something that is being added to so that faith alone through grace alone is being denied. As such there is a synergistic something in Creedo-Baptist beliefs. Creedo-Baptists are latent Arminians. This is a consequence of jamming together Ana-Baptist ecclesiology with Reformed soteriology.

3.) Scripture records the outrage of the Jews over the Gentiles being let into the Covenant community minus all the cultural accouterments of being Jewish. Yet, we are to believe that the Jews said nothing about their children being excluded from the covenant community in the new and better covenant where, per the Creedo-Baptists, the children were, for the first time ever, forbidden the sign and seal of covenant membership. Jews were outraged by Gentiles coming in but silent about their children being cast out.

4.) We would expect that with the collection of a first generation Church the demand would be placed upon adults to “repent and be baptized.” However, Acts 2 makes it clear, as heard through the ears of a covenantal non-Anabaptist people, that the promises were to “you and to your children.” So, yes, the New Testament record, in gathering a first generation Church would emphasize the necessity for adults to “repent and be baptized” but that does not negate that those same adults, as well as the subsequent generations would have understood that their children as belonging to them belonged to God and so should receive the sign and seal of the covenant.

Wherein Doug Wilson Goes All…. “Hey; Some sweJ Make Great Neighbors”

Today our favorite wordsmith penned a column titled; “Affection for Israel as Biblical Requirement.”

I must admit that Doug Wilson has an ability like few others to awaken Iron Ink from its dogmatic slumbers. Wilson has that ability to just make me slap my forehead and say … WTF? (What the facsimile?)

“Talmudic Judaism really was a distortion of God’s Word, but you can’t really draw a straight line from that to various modern ills like communism, environmentalism, globalism, and the like. A number of Jews went that direction, sure enough, but some other Jews went on to carve a cure for cancer out of a bar of soap, which made all the anti-Semites even more irritated. In other words, the Jews are a high performance people, and so when they are bad, they are really bad, but enough about the Frankfurt School, and when they are good, they are really good.”

Doug Wilson

1) Notice the craftiness and word wizardry of Wilson. Elsewhere in this column Doug will pen that being weJ has never been about blood but about covenant. Now, here there is a switcharoo because here sweJ are a high performance “people.” However, if one is a weJ, per Doug, only because of covenant and not because of blood, then how can we characterized sweJ as being a ethnic group of people who are by nature “high performance?”

2.) Can it really be said, when looking at the preponderance of historical evidence that sweJ (though what it is to be weJ is really up in the air given Wilson’s linguistic legerdemain) have been an equal blessing to Christians as they have been a curse? Is there no reason why Christians nations have over 100 times cast the weJ out of their countries? Is Wilson denying all the Medieval Church history that consistently found Mother Church in mortal combat with the sweJ?

Doug is putting his thumb on the scales here to suggest that “yeah, some sweJ have been real bad guys but there have been other sweJ who were really good guys so it all washes out in the laundry.”

Read your history. See the ongoing conflict between those whom Jesus called “a brood of vipers” (and what else is a brood of vipers but the seed of the serpent) vis-a-vis the Christian Church — sometimes referred to as the seed of the woman.

File Under: And another thing;

“One last thing. It is often said that Ashkenazi sweJ are not sweJ at all, and that there is not a drop of Abraham’s blood in their veins. And so it is maintained that this is all a lot of fuss and bother over a bunch of nothing. “A gift is not irrevocable if it was never given.” This overlooks the fact that being a weJ was always about covenant, and not about DNA…. Ashkenazi and Sephardic sweJ are sweJ by covenant. And because they are sweJ by covenant, it will be a piece of cake for God to graft them into the olive tree again.”

Doug Wilson

1.) Has Doug ever read Romans 9:3. Apparently no one told the Holy Spirit as he inspired St. Paul that that “being a Jew was always about covenant, and not about DNA.”

For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my KINSMEN ACCORDING TO THE FLESH.

2.) For the sake of argument assuming that Ashkenazi are originally Khazars and so not really blood sweJ, how can Ashkenazi non sweJ be disobedient Talmudic sweJ by covenant (and God certainly didn’t make a covenant with non racial Talmudic sweJ) if neither the original sweJ that covenant was made with were Talmudic nor the original Ashkenazi people didn’t embrace Talmudic Judaism until the 8th-9th century? How can a people in no way related by blood to the sweJ nor by related by covenant as seen in their identity as Talmudic sweJ be considered sweJ?

Doug, like Tolkien’s Saruman is losing his ability to cast a spell that people can’t see through.

PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA CONFERENCE ON CHURCH AND STATE A MAJOR DISAPPOINTMENT

It is not only in the States where the Reformed Church is absolutely cucked by errant Church and State thinking. Here Dr. Adi Schlebusch reports that South Africa has the same problem of being Anabaptistized on the issue of Church and State.

24 August 2022

All three lectures held during this week’s conference on church and state held by the Reformed Church East-Moot was a major disappointment. The first speaker, Erik van Alten from the Free Reformed Church Pretoria went on about how damaging the narrow relationship between church and state as found in the symbiotic practice of Eastern Orthodoxy is. He criticizes the “symphonic” relationship between church and state, especially in Russia, as a step away from the ideal of “a secular constitution, which in principle leaves room for any religion.” Van Alten then also most peculiarly succeeds to deconstruct and re-interpret article 36 of the Belgic Confession in such a way that he would have it imply that civil government should allow complete freedom of religious practice. For him, the idea of restricting any false religious practices “cannot be found in Scripture.” One can only wonder what Bible Van Alten reads, or rather, doesn’t read, in order to come to this conclusion.

Given the zealotic mood of Van Alten’s lecture, its most predictable part by far was the apartheid-cliché with which he concluded. He noted that while Eastern Orthodox countries “might seem far away to us … I wonder if this is truly that far away.” And so right there he concludes his lecture by showing off his woke-credentials in getting in a few more kicks to the stomach of the dead horse that is apartheid. Moreover, anyone who, in 2022 still refers to the ANC-regime as “this new dispensation” lives a life separated from reality.

Dr Victor d’Assonville junior remarkably managed to spend quite a large chunk of his lecture lamenting how little time he has to discuss his subject “Calvin on Church and Civil Government.” Given his experience as public speaker, this can only be attributed to his desire to say as little as possible on a reformer to whom he wants to appeal for legitimacy, but without having to go into any details about the practical implications of his ideas. D’Assonville does mention that Calvin believed that government has the duty to uphold the ten commandments, but only mentions this as a brief comment, immediately adding that he has received a lot of criticism for this fact from those that d’Assonville wrongly describes as “Reformed theologians.” Towards the end of his lecture he even goes as far as to ascribe the Enlightenment heresy of egalitarianism to Calvin as well as its accompanying idea of social justice—something which Christian philosophers have repeatedly shown to be completely at odds with Biblical justice. None of his claims are backed up by primary sources.

As expected, dr Gerhard Meijer from the Reformed Church East-Moot emphasized his denomination’s revision of article 36 of the Belgic Confession so that fighting idolatry would not be understood as the duty of civil government, but only the result of its protection of the church. What he fails to mention is of course the fact that there are many denominations in which this article has not been revised.

The most shocking part of the entire conference, however, was when Meijer had to answer a question relating to the forced closure of church services during the lockdown. He answered:

“If the authorities stopped services. Well, I don’t know if that is the question. The authorities did say that there is a serious disease and that we should be careful. But I don’t know if government ever said that people are not allowed to hold services. This isn’t written in any law … I don’t think one can jump from health regulations to conclude that this is a ban on church services.”

This is nothing short of a blatant, outright lie. If Meijer’s elders are worth their salt, they should immediately start the process of disciplining him. During the French Revolution Christians were murdered in the name of public safety. During the Russian Revolution Christians were murdered in the name of equality and justice. It is utterly absurd for Meijer to claim that policies are not tyrannical on the basis of the narrative justification of tyranny on the part of the tyrannical government itself.

At the end of the conference all three speakers re-iterated that they support the idea of complete religious freedom—something that is at odds with both Scripture and the Reformed Confessions. While the renewed interest in this topic is encouraging, it remains immensely disappointing that Reformed scholars such as Van Alten, d’Assonville and Meijer clearly identifies with a humanist approach to the relationship between church and state.

The Pactum Institute strongly condemns this humanist perspective as at odds with Christian orthodoxy and as a view which inevitably leads to the divination of the state. RJ Rushdoony rightly describes the heresy promoted during this conference as follows:

The Enlightenment shifted the center of interest from God to man, and from the Church to the State … Man was now the measure of all things, and it was man’s will that needed to be done … Enlightenment humanism began with the ‘moral baggage’ of its context, Christendom, but, in practice, it steadily stripped off all morality in favor of self-enjoyment. At the same time, being at war with God, profanation became a prized pleasure … One of the quiet goals of the Enlightenment was the disestablishment of Churches and of Christianity… A first step in this process of disestablishment was to reduce Christianity to an option for man, a matter of choice, not of necessity. The realm of necessity was held to be the civil government. Freedom came to mean deliverance from the Church to the State, from supernatural mandates and laws to ‘natural’ and statist laws. The Reformation had said plainly that Biblical faith requires belief in God’s predestination, in God’s sovereign choice… This was reversed by the Enlightenment, and then by Arminianism. Sovereign choice was transferred to man. Man, it was held, has the option to choose God or reject Him, to declare God to be elect or non-elect.[1]

 

[1] Rousas John Rushdoony, To Be as God: A Study of Modern Thought since the Marquis de Sade (Vallecito, CA: Ross House, 2003), 9-10, 17.   

Wherein R2K and a certain Austrian Corporal Agree.

“The war will run its course, and then I will see it as my life’s work to sort out the problem with the Churches. Only then will the German nation be safe. I do not care in the slightest about articles of faith, but I’m not having clerics sticking their noses in worldly affairs. This organised lie has to be broken in such a way that the state becomes the absolute master.”
 Adolph Hitler

German Chancellor on December 13, 1941

1.) There are those who try to style Hitler out to be some kind of Christian and/or hero that we should really admire since he stood up against the Bolsheviks. We can certainly admit that the evil of Hitler was to be preferred to the evil of Stalin and maybe even the evil of FDR and Churchill but to say that Hitler was “Christian” or a “Hero” is just nonsense. The man says here, “I do not care in the slightest about the articles of faith.” To not care in the slightest about the articles of faith makes one a anti-Christ.  Hitler was nobody for Christians to esteem and the last thing we want is any form of German National Socialism to be resurrected anywhere in the West. Did you see the word “Socialism?”

Of course my convictions run deep here because a German National Socialism policy here would mean the required murder of my Cerebral Palsy Grand-daughter by the National Socialist State.

2.) If a modern Hitler showed up at Westminster-Cal. @ Escondido and said in a chapel service; “I’m not having clerics sticking their noses in worldly affairs,” the chapel may well collapse from the resounding reverberations from the Amens coming from the faculty. A modern Hitler is just the kind of Magistrate that the R2K chaps could get behind.

3.) Another reason we see to eschew those who want to praise Hitler is the fact that he says here that the state is to be the absolute Master. Typical Fascism. Everything inside the State. Nothing outside the State. Biblical Christians worth their salt want nothing to do with that kind of mindset. Biblical Christians do not concur that the State is to be the absolute Master. Biblical Christians insist that God has ordained different jurisdictions of authority where sovereignty is entrusted to different covenantal heads as that sovereignty is handled consistent with God’s revealed Law-Word. Magistrates handle swords. Fathers handle rods. Pastors/Elders handle keys. The state is not the absolute Master.

You want to be R2K? Then live with the idea that should a Hitler come along with this mindset you are his lackeys.