Gotta love this. Community college professor in Iowa tells students the story of Adam and Eve shouldn’t be taken literally - and gets a pink slip for his efforts:

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday. He said he was fired Thursday.

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Bitterman’s Tuesday course was telecast to students in Osceola over the Iowa Communications Network. A few students in the Osceola classroom, he said, thought the lesson was “denigrating their religion.”

“I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn’t given any more credibility than any other god,” Bitterman said. “I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there.”

Bitterman said he called the story of Adam and Eve a “fairy tale” in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney.

Now, I love this story on several levels. But perhaps the best part of it is the fact that these students - cultural conservatives - were so incensed that their religion had been disrespected that they were going to sue.

On what basis? On what grounds? Doesn’t matter. My God is better than your god, and if you try to gainsay it, I’ll see you in court.