"Humanism is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was
whispered in the first days of Creation under the Tree of the knowledge of Good and
Evil: 'Ye shall be as gods.'" (Qutd. in Baker 206)
Transhumanism offers an updated, hi-tech variety of Luciferianism. The appellation
"Transhumanism" was coined by evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley
("Transhumanism," Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia , no pagination). Huxley defined
the transhuman condition as "man remaining man, but transcending himself, by
realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature" (no pagination). However, by
1990, Dr. Max More would radically redefine Transhumanism as follows:
Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman
condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect
for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or
transhuman) existence in this life... Transhumanism differs from humanism in
recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of
our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies... (No pagination)
Transhumanism advocates the use of nanotechnology, biotechnology, cognitive
science, and information technology to propel humanity into a "posthuman"
condition. Once he has arrived at this condition, man will cease to be man. He will
become a machine, immune to death and all the other "weaknesses" intrinsic to his
former human condition. The ultimate objective is to become a god. Transhumanism
is closely aligned with the cult of artificial intelligence. In the very influential book
The Age of Spiritual Machines, AI high priest Ray Kurzweil asserts that technological
immortality could be achieved through magnetic resonance imaging or some
technique of reading and replicating the human brain's neural structure within a
computer ("Technological Immortality," no pagination). Through the merger of
computers and humans, Kurzweil believes that man will "become god-like spirits
inhabiting cyberspace as well as the material universe" (no pagination).
Following the Biblical revisionist tradition of the Gnostic Hypostasis myth,
Transhumanists invert the roles of God and Satan. In an essay entitled "In Praise of
the Devil," Transhumanist ideologue Max More depicts Lucifer as a heroic rebel
against a tyrannical God:
The Devil—Lucifer—is a force for good (where I define 'good' simply as that which I
value, not wanting to imply any universal validity or necessity to the orientation).
'Lucifer' means 'light-bringer' and this should begin to clue us in to his symbolic
importance. The story is that God threw Lucifer out of Heaven because Lucifer had
started to question God and was spreading dissension among the angels. We must
remember that this story is told from the point of view of the Godists (if I may coin a
term) and not from that of the Luciferians (I will use this term to distinguish us from