Andrew Sullivan points to an article about how Creationism is pushing people away from the real message of Christianity. But if you read the comments, you find a lot of Christians reiterating YEC positions, pre-tribulation, Calvinism, and the KJV-only movement, and contorting themselves into all sorts of complex rationalizations in order to seem reasonable while still keep their Christianist bona fides.
Even recently I thought there was a moral dimension to Christ's message that spoke to a humanist core without the need for a lot of supernatural hocus pocus. I thought that if you looked at Jesus the philosopher, you might understand him simply through his imperatives to help the poor and to love your neighbor. More and more than seems like wishful thinking.
The message that I'm getting today, even from Sullivan, is that the only message of Jesus is one of personal salvation and transcendence. That the love your neighbor stuff is really secondary; something you do, maybe, along the way. Ultimately it's all about getting saved and going to heaven. In other words, it's ALL hocus pocus.
It's all about sin and redemption for a fallen world that in the context of five billion or so years of universal history seems more than a little short-sighted and self-absorbed. Who shall redeem the arboreal squids in 40 million years time?
More importantly, there is no moral center to a religion whose only good is that which gets one into heaven. Sometimes you feed the poor, sometimes you kill them. Depends on God's mood that day.
So I guess the answer to the larger question is "yes." Creationism is pushing people away from Christianity. It's the loose thread that destroys the whole sweater.
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Listening to: Son Volt - Chaos Streams
via FoxyTunes
