[extropy-chat] Raelians

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

I confess that I subscribe to the "rael-science" yahoogroup, a
news-only group with about five postings per day. These days they take
much material from Betterhumans and other transhumanist publications,
but there was a time where subscribing to rael-science was one of the
best way to be alerted of interesting news. Still today it is quite
useful. Only one in ten posts is Raelian propaganda, the rest is
interesting alerts on cutting edge science and in particular human
enhancement tech. They launched a service in Spanish with the same
features ("rael-ciencia").
The signature line says:
---
"Ethics"  is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.
There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history,
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.
On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour
---
Now, this seem a quite hardline transhumanist statement to me. Hell, I
am not that radical, nor are many posters on our lists.
Reading the rael.org website you find much hardline transhumanist
content mixed with gibberish about flying saucers. An impression is
that this is an extreme transhumanist movement with a layer of
flying-saucers and new-age superposed. Other components of the extra
layer are normative lifestyle guidelines and endless requests for
money. The extra layer does not have much to do with the message
(remove it, and you are left with hardline transhumanism that could
stand on its own), so I frequently wonder why it is there.
Some writings of Rael are surprisingly reasonable and well written
once you remove the flying-saucers bits. The only other flaw, again,
is that they are too radical and extremists and unwilling to
compromise.
I am sure Rael himself and other top officers never believed in the
flying-saucers layer so, again, I wonder why it is there when the
massage would stand on its own.
Then I think that:
The Raelians have 60.000 paying members worldwide and a lot of money.
All transhumanist associations together have perhaps 300 paying members.
I wonder what conclusions we should make.
G.