Transhumanist Religious Experience: Beyond Secular Faith?

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In our article, we advance a case for considering transhumanism as a religion. Following William James, we define „religion” minimally as a set of experiences that define and shape one’s identity. These may include peak experiences, the feeling of transcendence, and also access to previously hidden knowledge, or gnosis. In James’ view, mystical experiences in particular include feelings of ineffability (partial or complete incommunicability), noesis (secret knowledge), transience and passivity (subordination to a higher power). Using a religious studies framework gleaned from James, we critically examine transhumanism, with an eye towards answering the question of how religious experiences figure into transhumanism, in so far as it functions as a religion. Specifically, we are interested in how transhumanists themselves describe their experiences through the lens of their diverse, often (but not always) explicitly secularist belief systems. Theologian Hava Tirosh-Samuelson has argued for conceiving of transhumanism generally as a „secular faith.” Building on cultural anthropologist Jon Bialecki’s work on Mormon Transhumanism, we argue that the complex technological circumstances of the early 21st century have resulted in a technognostic form of religiosity that blends a belief in human technological prowess with a religiously motivated hope for transcendence.