A half arsed sermon

There is something surreal about the current court case testing the legitimacy of teaching a variant of creationism. This strange construct is akin to bashing square pegs into round holes. Anything, it seems, to fit in with the equally bizarre concept of Christianity practiced be its adherents.
The issue, to my mind, is not creationism (by any name) but the utter corruption of Christian teaching as expressed by the evangelical/fundamentalist movements.
While they claim scriptural authority for all their teaching, including creationism, it is obviously an authority based on selective reading. Only those passages which supposedly shore up their strange notions are chosen as a basis for their ‘Christian’ moral code.
If the Christian religion was truly and wholly scripturally based, adherents would belong to Jewish sects and attend synagogues. As it is, a ‘church’ was created which the Christ did not instruct or mandate. The separate Christian church was most probably the result of the power play between Peter and Paul.
The moral imperatives of the Christian right are equally not rooted in Christ’s teachings. If pushed for scriptural authority the Christian Right will refer to obscure Old Testament and Pauline passages. This amounts to finding any proof to support their argument, no matter how irrelevant that proof is.
It is this pseudo scriptural authority which supports the blatant hypocrisy which marks these odd religionists. So certain are they of the wrongness of killing an embryo, they will kill a grown person to prevent it. So certain are they of the supremacy of white Christians, they will relegate any other race, including that which Christ came from, to lesser mortals or animals. There is no Christian scripture which will authorize these travesties, simply a wrongheaded moral conviction.
Where are the traditional churches in all this? The ones which might also be suspect as to their ‘Christ’ given legitimacy, but open to His teachings nonetheless? Why aren’t they fighting tooth and nail to protect the traditional way?
All too often these are being subsumed by zealots within, to mimic the biblically ignorant Christian Right zealots. If not, they are bound up in a different moral dilemma. They are frozen from speaking out or acting for fear of breaching, their gentle more loving understandings.
Where is the angry Christ who would cleanse the temple of money changers and cleansing the temple? Where is the one who would confront these latter day Pharisees?
And, let’s quote the Gospel here for some real scriptural authority.

“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:20 RSV).

“The Pharisees perhaps meant to obey God, but eventually they became so devoted and extremist in very limited parts of The Law (plus all that they themselves added to it), that they became blind to The Messiah when He was in their very midst. They saw His miracles, they heard His Words, but instead of receiving it with joy, they did all that they could to stop Him - eventually to the point of getting Him killed because He truthfully claimed to be the Son of God.”

It sounds awfully familiar to me.
So a call to those real churches being persecuted and belittled by the mad ravings of the right: Stand up for yourself, the real scriptures and Christ’s teachings. It is your beliefs which these people undermine.
A final word: There is no biblical or moral directive for these wooly thinkers to force their broken logic on the rest of us, through political or any other means. Look to your own salvation, thank you! I will look after my own.