Deliver us from Rael
Deliver us from Rael
December 2005
It was in 1973, during his first close encounter of the Third Kind, that the Elohim supposedly gave Claude Vorilhon the name of Rael. “It literally means,” he details in The Book that tells the truth, “Light of God” or, for a more precise translation, “Light of the Elohim”. Curiously, three years earlier, French television aired an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, in which one the characters was called… Rael.
Rael’s theories? Kooky but definitely not original. He recycles more than he invents. Among his acknowledged or secret influences…
the alleged sightings of Greys; the hedonism of Charles Fourier; the sectarianism of Saint-Simon; the politics of Plato and Jean-Marie Le Pen; the religion of Buddhism; the libertarianism of Jiddu Krishnamurti; the poetry of Khalil Gibran; the mythology of Genesis; the esoterica of the ”L’Aventure Mystérieuse” series; the UFOlogy of George Adamski; the symbology and eugenics of Nazism; the Blake & Mortimer comic book; and the science-fiction of The Fifth Element, The Matrix series, A. E. van Vogt, Aldous Huxley, Roger Zelazny, and Pierre Bordage.
However, Rael has two other and major influences that are awkward for transhumanists: the technological predictions of Hans Moravec, Eric Drexler, and Ray Kurweil.
When we read Rael’s ravings about mind uploading, advanced nanotechnology, and, of course, the promise of immortality, it’s obvious that he synthesizes in a distorted fashion the visions of Moravec, Drexler and Kurzweil, with an intentionally religious rhetoric, which is not only used for tax purposes.
However, he introduces a small yet very clever personal nuance: rapid-growth cloning. So, in the future, when you die, you could download your mind into a young adult body, so rapidly grown that it wouldn’t have memories of its own, in order to benefit from personal immortality. Rael is smart. He knows that if a normal clone of you (that doesn’t have your downloaded mind) attends your funeral, it will not be you that lives on but your twin sibling. So, with this ruse, he has overcome the usual criticism of cloning.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that “Rael” and “Raelian” are the two words that come up the most in the frequently asked questions for transhumanist activists, especially those located in Quebec, the current home of the Raelian movement…
Since Rael continues to hurt the very transhumanist cause he praises in his books and speeches, the following is my unsollicited advice for our techno-prophet:
1. Hold a press conference where you publicly confess that Raelianism is an organized lie;
2. Liquidate the assets of the Raelian movement to donate most of the money to legitimate cult awareness networks and become their most vocal spokesperson; and
3. If you can’t abandon the joys of being a religious leader, join the Unitarian Universalist Association, the only creedless religion whose principles and purposes you could endorse. I’m sure that someone as charismatic as you could convince a majority of your followers to contine… following you.
Think about it, Claude. We all know you’re a publicity seeker so, short of really producing the first human clone, what could you do that could possibly top the spectacle of such a mea culpa and path to redemption?
Justice De Thezier is a social entrepreneur and creative professional. In 2003, he founded the Quebec Transhumanist Association, which he closed down in January 2008. From January 2006 to January 2008, De Thezier served on the board of directors of the World Transhumanist Association. And, from November 2005 to March 2007, he contributed to the Cyborg Democracy web portal and blog.