Letters From Grandpa #482

• LETTERS FROM GRANDPA
• 482

Dearest grandchild,

Today’s letter will deal with facts and feelings. Many years ago the late Dale Storms and I flew my little plane to Colorado for a CFI renewal seminar. Dale was a decorated war hero who flew B-25’s in W.W. II. I was fortunate to have him train me for an instrument rating.

At any rate the FAA was present with a Barany chair that illustrated the dangers of vertigo. The chair was named for Hungarian physiologist Robert Barany who invented this swivel chair to demonstrate the way our inner ear affects our sense of balance. This won him the Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1914. At the seminar a pilot was blindfolded and placed on the Barany chair that spun around. He was given a stick to signal which direction he thought he was moving, right, left, or stationary. After only a few revolutions the fluid in his inner ear indicated to him that he had stopped turning, but he had not. He was asked to bend forward, and return upright. At which point he literally fell off the chair into the arms of the instructor. His “feelings” caused him to completely lose touch with reality!

The word “vertigo” comes from the Latin “vertere” which means to turn, and “igo” which is a condition of turning about. For a pilot vertigo is also called “Spacial Disorientation. This was what killed our beloved Mike Pratt and two companions on December 24, 1974. This also killed John F. Kennedy and his companions off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. Thousands of people have died because their pilot got vertigo and went by his feelings rather than facts. It is therefore imperative that a flight instructor impress upon the student that when you cannot see outside the airplane, it doesn’t matter how you feel, you must believe your instruments! 91% of all accidents caused by Spatial Disorientation are fatal! FACTS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN FEELINGS!

• Sadly we live in a generation where feelings are becoming more important than facts!
• As we have mentioned before, the Oxford Dictionarie’s Word of the Year in 2016 was “post truth”. This is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
• For example, Jesus said that “At the beginning of creation God made them male and female.” (Mark 10:6) This is a fact! On February 2, 2022, however, Dr. Shaziya Allarakha stated that your gender is not determined by the facts of biology, but how you identify yourself. Dr. Allarakha said besides male and female there are 72 other genders. Since he determines gender by how you “feel” the number of new genders has no limits regardless of the facts.
• Facts are now so irrelevant that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has been confirmed to be a Supreme Court Justice in spite of the fact that she cannot define what a woman is.
• A list of 70 businesses have joined with Target to allow men to use a woman’s restroom if they identify as a woman because they also cannot define what a woman is.
• Voyeurism, however, is still a crime and in a random act of justice a 43 year old man was convicted for going into a women’s restroom in a Target store in Idaho and taking pictures of an 18 year old girl trying on a swim suit. His real name is Sean Patrick Smith but he identified as Shauna Smith. Would Judge Jackson have to recuse herself from this case?
• California became the first state to allow a nonbinary gender marker on birth certificates, and the right to choose “bride” “groom” or “neither’ on your marriage certificate.
• In March 2023 twelve year old Liam Morrison was kicked out of the John T. Nichols Jr. Middle School in Massachusetts because he wore a t-shirt saying there are only two genders.
• HARRISBURG, PA. (TND) — Guidelines posted on the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s website about “creating gender-inclusive schools and classrooms” call the idea that there are only two genders a "faulty concept," and indicate gender-neutral pronouns like "ne, ve, ze/zie and xe" are identifiers sometimes used by students.
• A man called himself Anne Andres and identified as a woman to compete in the Canadian Powerlifting Union’s 2023 competition. “Her” total weight lifted in squat, bench and deadlift resulted in a final score of 597.5 kilograms, which was over 200 kilograms more than “her” closest opponent, SuJan Gill, who finished at 387.5 kilograms.
• Some are fighting back! Nicholas Meriwether is a devout Christian and a professor at the Shawnee State University in Ohio. In January 2018 a trans woman lodged a complaint against him because he called her “sir”. The college tried to control his speech but in a rare example of judicial justice Meriwether sued the university and was awarded $400,000 in damages and attorney’s fees.
• Paul warned of “men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” (Romans 1:18) Of those “Who are self seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil.” (Romans 2:8) And who “Perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.” (2 Thessalonians 2:10)

Wise King Solomon warned: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” (Proverbs 14:12) This is a fact and it is not only true for pilots of an airplane, but also for all who will stand before the Judgment seat of Christ. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” (2 Corinthians 5:10).

THE GOOD NEWS IS, IN CHRIST YOU CAN KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE (JOHN 8:32)

I love you,

Grandpa Boyce