Which Religious Claim Seems Most Fantastic?

1) Sometime around the year 5 Before Christ in Bethlehem, Palestine, a virgin named Mary gave birth to a mortal she named Jesus who was also God. The God/Man/Son of God was crucified when he was 33, but He arose from the dead and sits in heaven next to his father, God. At her death, the Virgin Mary was assumed bodily into heaven. 2) In 1823, in western New York, an angel named Moroni gave golden plates to a local con man and scam artist named Joseph Smith. Angel Moroni also gave Smith two magical stones, Urum and Thummim, which enabled Smith to translate the gibberish on the golden plates into English. It took Smith six years and 20 visits from the angel to produce The Book of Mormon. After the plates had been duly translated and put into book form, Smith gave the plates back to Angel Moroni and Moroni returned to the land of angels. Smith claimed the Garden of Eden is in Missouri. 3) In 1952, a science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, wrote a book called “Dianetics”. It was a self-help system and Hubbard claimed Dianetics was a new religion. The practices outlined in the book were later called “Scientology”. Hubbard said the brain works like a computer. This computer in our heads could be made more efficient if our clogged memory banks were cleared of all inhibiting and negative memories called engrams. Hubbard said these engrams in our computer brain had been caused 75 million years ago when the evil alien ruler Xenu kidnapped a bunch of aliens called Thetans from all over the universe. Xenu brought the Thetans to earth in golden DC-8 space planes and then blew them up in volcanoes with hydrogren bombs. The souls of these aliens attached themselves to our ancestors and subsequently the Thetan souls came all the way down to us. By using L. Ron Hubbard’s system of auditing, the engrams caused by the Thetan souls could finally be cleared out of our computer brains. Hubbard also claimed that he and his wife Alexis Valerie Hubbard were the parents of the only baby who had ever started talking at the age of three months and who was totally free from all phobias. Hubbard eventually said Dianetics/Scientolgy had been a total hoax, but that, oddly, everything he had written also turned out to be true. 4) On February 7, 2007, the self-confessed lying and deceiving homosexual head of the New Life Church and ex-president of the National Association of Evangelicals claimed that he was now 100% heterosexual after three weeks of intensive therapy. Yeah, I know, it’s a close call.