Thread by @TheValuesVoter

Are you inverted? Do you believe up is down and down is up?

I’ve used this analogy a couple of times before, but pilots can experience a phenomena called spatial disorientation in which they believe and feel the opposite of what is real.

Do you believe those who lie to you?

In the last two years, a significant portion of the country has come to believe that people who are lying to them are telling the truth and that people who are telling them the truth are lying.

Inversion.

The thing is, our senses can be fooled. We can really, truly believe with all our heart that something is true when it’s absolutely false. It feels right. But it’s really not.

Which is why pilots are trained to trust the instruments. Our feelings are more likely to be incorrect.

What are our instruments?

The ultimate instrument, especially for those of us who call ourselves Christians, is God’s Written Word, the Bible. If something someone says contradicts the God’s Word (the ACTUAL TEXT, not someone’s interpretation of it) that thing is not correct.

If you’re an American citizen, and especially if you call yourself things like “Patriot” and “Constitutional Conservative” is our US Constitution. Again, what it ACTUALLY SAYS and not some political hack’s summary of it.

And as just a person who can think critically, another instrument is objectively verifiable facts. What’s the temperature right now? It has a precise value. It’s a fact. It’s not a matter of subjective opinion.

You can’t be a student of the Bible and believe that God’s mission for the Church is to fulfill some secular political or nationalistic goal. It says otherwise.

You can’t believe from reading the Bible that God opposes vaccines. It’s completely silent on the topic.

You can’t be a person who has any familiarity with the US Constitution and believe that a President who loses an election will be “reinstated” during the term of the person who succeeds them. There is no such concept in the Constitution. It’s not a thing.

And if you claim to be a rational person, you have to accept the idea that there are such things as non-negotiable facts. Today has a date. We are in a certain place on earth (which, by the way, is a sphere). There are absolute facts, which are not relative or subject to opinion.

Trust the instruments. Which means you need to be familiar enough with them to read them and know what they say.

Because, again, it’s possible to completely, absolutely believe something and feel it deep within. And be wrong.