Welcome to the Bible Belt, Red Oak, Iowa!
If you want to teach in an Iowa Community College, you should probably be prepared to teach that snakes have a tradition of talking, eating the wrong apple can bring on the downfall of mankind (sic), and the manly ribcage was the precursor to the womanly womb.
In other words, Iowa is preparing students for jobs in the Bush Administration.
Southwestern Community College instructor Steve Bitterman says he was fired for teaching that the Adam and Eve creation myth IS a myth.
And they say the South has a Bible Belt problem!
Des Moines Register
“I’m just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master’s degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job,” Bitterman said.
Bitterman reportedly uses the Old Testament in his course on western civilization, but teaches from an academic standpoint. “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.”
He apparently referred to the story of Adam and Eve a “fairy tale” in a conversation with a student after class, but the student was offended, and threatened to call an attorney. The next thing Bitterman knows, his classroom services are no longer needed.
“As a taxpayer, I’d like to know if a tax-supported public institution of higher learning has given veto power over what can and cannot be said in its classrooms to a fundamentalist religious group,” he said. “If it has … then the taxpaying public of Iowa has a right to know. What’s next? Whales talk French at the bottom of the sea?”
And on a related note: What Does the Bible Really Teach Us?
Iowa Adam and Eve Community College News Bush Politics Religious Fundamentalism American Education
