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A bit of inventive fiction from Religion in the News achieved e-lore status by becoming one of the many tales folks delight in mailing to one another, then puzzling over whether they could possibly be true: Elroy Willis, the proprietor of that site, wrote the dashboard Jesus tale in January 1999, posting it to the USENET newsgroups alt.atheism and alt.atheism.satire. His first published draft lacked the We're just glad our daughter had Jesus in her heart when she died finale, but that coda was quickly added to it. Unlike the contemporaneous Landover Baptist, a well-known spoof site which takes mighty swipes at religion but doesn't clearly indicate to the unwary that all of its articles are humor pieces, Religion in the News warned its visitors what they were in for with the disclaimer: Some of these stories are really true. See if you can figure out which ones they are. Apparently, some visitors who came to that site failed at this task, because the plastic Jesus tale washed up in our inbox numerous times after its 1999 debut. For those still harboring any doubts about its authenticity, we note there was no 17-year-old Darlene Fulps who launched her vehicle into an intersection against a red light believing the plastic Jesus she clutched to her chest would protect her. She, like the rest of the story, was fiction. We discuss another of Willis' creations on this site, the Leap of Faith rapture story, which also featured a dumb woman, religion, and vehicular death. (And no, we're not saying any more than that because it's too enjoyable a tale to want to spoil by telling too much of it.)
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