The transhumanist ambition to transcend biological constraints echoes deeply entrenched religious narratives, often invoking a lexicon steeped in salvation, perfection, and eternal life. This rhetoric operates as both a visionary framework and an evangelization strategy, highlighting a profound dialectic at the core of transhumanist thought: the promise of safeguarding humanity precisely through its radical technological transformation. By engaging with new religious movements such as Terasem and the Church of Perpetual Life, alongside traditional spiritual paradigms, this paper tries to illuminate the ways in which transhumanism reimagines humanity's age-old pursuit of preserving its essential essence.
Drawing on Ferrando's and Haraway's philosophical analysis of post and transhumanism, the paper emphasizes the dialectic tension between the augmentation of human capacities and the existential continuity of human essence, framing the techno-philosophical imperatives that question the very boundaries of humanity as theorized by AI-visionnaires like Ray Kurzweil and Nick Land. This talk positions the concept of humanity as both a negotiated idea and a religious discourse construction, analyzing new and established religious ethics within the conceptual perspectives of those transhumanist ideologies that actually challenge the ontological assumptions into what is human in humans. Moreover, transhumanist language frequently appropriates religious archetypes—immortality, ascension, and the promise of a new Eden—suggesting a technological soteriology aimed at delivering humanity into an optimized, post-biological future. This paper interrogates whether these narratives of technological salvation can genuinely preserve human agency and the spiritual-ethical heritage that have long defined humanity's self-conception, reframing the debate by examining the potential erosion of these values through an overemphasis on efficiency, optimization, and perfection.