Conservatives must raise Cain at public events, using Alinsky’s rules!

It is important to understand that Joshua's army had marched all night the 20 miles from Gilgal to Gibeon to do battle with their enemies, the five strong kings who had pooled their resources to fight the Israelites. Joshua's army had prevailed in the battle and his enemies were in retreat. But Joshua did not want them to be able to get back to their fortified cities to regroup. More daylight was needed for Joshua's troops to finish them off. To prevent their return, he asked God to lengthen the day (see painting below).

There are many interesting interpretations of this Biblical passage, some of which can be read here, but, it was clear that the Church wanted the public to believe that it was the Sun that moved, not the Earth about the Sun. According to many writers, this was why Nicolaus Copernicus, a Canon in the Church, waited until he was on his death bed before he allowed his revolutionary book showing the Sun to be the centre of the universe to be published, even though the text was completed 30 years earlier. To read more about this, including an alternative theory about why the book was so delayed, see here.

This is also why Galileo ran into so much trouble when he claimed that the Church was wrong and that Copernicanism was the truth, a position that Galileo could not really know with certainty either (to be fair, it should be noted that the Church was already dealing with the unrest of the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, so maintaining doctrinal control was crucial for them. Galileo's opposition to the Church's geocentric teachings was viewed as a threat to their authority and theological doctrines, an understandable position, given the times).

Similarly, the assumed truth of Isaac Newton's laws of motion and law of universal gravitation eventually acted to slow the advancement of science until Einstein showed them to be incomplete. We need to remind leftists, at least those who are not climate extremists, that when authorities preach truth about science, progress stops. They should welcome, not condemn, questioning of the status quo. Science advances through fearless investigation, not frightened acquiescence to fashionable thinking, let alone the smearing of intellectual opponents as "deniers."

I did this a few years ago in a Government of Ontario public meeting ostensibly set up to identify obstacles to progress on "climate action." After several members of the public were roundly booed and harassed for voicing doubt about the science being relied on by the government, I went to the microphone and said:

We have just seen a demonstration of what I think is the greatest obstacle to progress on this file - it is the intolerance of alternative points of view about this highly complex science. We should welcome and discuss skeptical inquiries, not try to silence them!

The reaction? Dead silence. You could hear a pin drop. The government representative had nothing to say and the audience recognized that the activists had violated what is supposed to be a fundamental tenant of progressivism, namely keeping an open mind to different perspectives.

And, of course, the reliance on consensus to determine what is truth in science is simply a "bandwagon logical fallacy" when we base the validity of our argument on how many people believe it. A show of hands does not decide the validity of scientific hypotheses. When Albert Einstein was told about a book titled Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein), published in 1931, he replied, "Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough."

The award-winning American author and filmmaker Dr. Michael Crichton also put it well in his January 17, 2003 lecture, "Aliens Cause Global Warming," presented at California Institute of Technology:

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."

The left took over many of our institutions by effectively applying Saul Alinsky's rules. It's about time conservatives read his "Rules for Radicals – A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals," available for free on the web, and then got out and raised Cain at public events. Our children will never forgive us if we do not.