No one struggles with literal interpretation of other books. They only struggle with Scripture because they don’t like what it teaches.
They would rather warp the meaning of “literal” to abuse figures of speech, and come up with absurd imagery, rather than respect the text.
The British army once sentenced Daniel Morgan to 500 lashes, a punishment that usually killed a man, for the crime of knocking out an officer who struck him. He survived every stroke. And he spent the rest of his life joking that the drummer had miscounted and only given him 499, so the British still owed him one. He collected that debt at a place called Cowpens.
Morgan was not born to anything. He was a rough, barely educated frontiersman who made his living hauling freight by wagon on the Virginia frontier, a big, powerful, hot-tempered young man. During the French and Indian War, serving as a civilian teamster with the British army, a British lieutenant struck him with the flat of a sword. Morgan answered with his fist and dropped the officer cold. For a colonial to strike a British officer was close to a capital offense, and the court-martial sentenced him to five hundred lashes with the cat-o'-nine-tails, a flogging meant to flay a man and very often to kill him.
They tied him up and laid it on, and Daniel Morgan did not die. He carried the ridged scars on his back for the rest of his life. But instead of breaking him, that brutal punishment forged something. It left him with a cold, permanent hatred of the British army and its contempt for colonial men like him, a hatred he would one day repay with interest. And it gave him his lifelong joke: the drummer lost count and stopped at 499, so the British, he liked to say, were still one lash short of paying him in full.
When the Revolution came, that uneducated wagoner turned out to be a natural soldier of rare gifts. He raised a company of frontier riflemen, crack shots who could kill at distances that terrified British regulars, and he led them north to Saratoga, where his marksmen helped shatter Burgoyne's army and win the turning-point victory of the war. Morgan had a feel for battle that trained European officers lacked, an instinct for ground, for timing, and above all for the men he led. He understood that his militia were not professional soldiers and could not be asked to do what professionals did, so instead of cursing them for it, he built his tactics around what they could do.
That genius reached its peak at the Battle of Cowpens in January 1781, one of the most perfectly fought battles in American history. Facing the dreaded Banastre Tarleton, Morgan set a trap built entirely on human nature. He put his unreliable militia in the front line and asked them only for two volleys, then permission to fall back, which they gladly did. Tarleton's British, seeing the Americans retreat, charged forward in a confident rush straight into Morgan's real line of hardened Continentals, and then Morgan sprang the jaws, hitting the British on both flanks at once in a double envelopment while his cavalry rode down their rear. In minutes Tarleton's command was destroyed, hundreds killed and captured, one of the most crushing and complete victories of the war, and Tarleton himself barely escaped. It was the frontier wagoner out-generaling the darlings of the British army.
So the debt was paid. The boy they tried to flog to death grew up to be the man who methodically dismantled the British in the field, who understood soldiers because he had been treated like dirt as one, and who turned the hard lessons of his own back into some of the finest tactics the Revolution ever saw. Remember Daniel Morgan. The British gave him 499 lashes and made an enemy who never forgot, and he collected the last one at Cowpens, with interest.
🚨 BREAKING: President Trump announces he is invoking the DEFENSE PRODUCTION ACT to release $150 million to INCREASE American refining capacity, to produce more diesel and gasoline
This will provide MUCH needed relief for farmers and everyday Americans who are facing financial pressure from Zelensky continuing to bomb diesel refineries in Russia.
ANYTHING we can do for our farmers is necessary right now.
@freedomlanders@chris_blodgett@DrFrankTurek They absolutely are. Modern-looking Homo sapiens clearly interbred with Neandertal-looking h. sapiens, proving they are members of the same biological species. Hugh Ross totally botches this, as @Fred_Butler explains https://t.co/HG1wYQnjL2
@HilaireNereus Scooby Doo meme:
Let's See who really wrote this!
<pulls off a Joel Webbon mask to reveal JD>
Wait a minute,
<pulls of the JD mask to reveal a chatgpt robot>
@Pastor_Gabe I have one old lady down the street who put up a Disneyesque Haunted Mansion themed yard. Pretty impressive for an old lady with a walker.
@khendarian@StephenJMZ I saw that in the movie and me and a friend had to step out for a breather! I was like 11. Lady who worked with my mom told her to take me because I would love it!
David Attenborough has lived so long that there's a photo of him showing a Cockatoo to King Charles when the king was a kid. Charles and Princess Anne, January 4, 1958,
You need to understand how Right-wing people under 40 view the Left.
When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.
These are not the sort of people that make up our Left-wing counterparts that we grew up with, went to school with, or work with.
When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.
We think of Discord troons that invaded our hobbies, Reddit mods who are drunk on the most insignificant power imaginable, that one girl from high school or college who became a literal Communist, and that friend or family member who cut off all contact because we refused to treat their mental illness like a status symbol.
We think of people who, if they ever became a majority of the country and actually managed to possess political power, would inevitably kill tens of millions of people out of blind envy and petty cruelty.
Younger people on the Right come across as impatient and anxious in their mindset and mannerisms because they understand what will eventually happen when these people succeed their Gen X and Boomer predecessors in the Democratic Party.
They know what is to come if their own generational cohorts on the Left actually take power, and they feel incredibly exasperated that it seems like none of their parents or grandparents understand just how late the hour truly is.