Raelianism
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| See Raëlism in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. |
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Introduction
Raëlianism, or the Raëlian movement is an atheistic religion (often considered a cult) founded in the 1970's by a French national and former racecar driver named Raël, formerly Claude Vorilhon.
Beliefs
The Raëlians are atheists and tend to have no beliefs in supernatural deities. They believe that most supernatural beliefs are the result of early people's contact with extraterrestrial beings whom they mistook for gods. Often they tend to support this belief with a very liberal interpretation of religious texts, especially the Bible and Qur'an. The name they give to these extraterrestrials, Elohim, is a Hebrew word for "God". They make much of the fact that the name ends with the suffix "im" which is used to indicate a plural in Hebrew. Usually they translate this as "those who came from the sky" though non-Raëlians usually translate it as "mighty one(s)".
Raëlian cosmology holds that the universe is infinitely old and infinitely large. Raëlians reject the theory of evolution in favor of the belief that all life on Earth is the handiwork of the Elohim, who were, in turn, created by a race of beings older than they, who were created by an older race still, and so on ad infinitum. They believe that life, like the universe, exists infinitely in space and time, and that each generation allows the next one to develop to a point to ascertain that they are "ready" before revealing their accumulated technological secrets to their creations.
While the Elohim are not considered in this belief system to be supernatural, they do seem suspiciously god-like. Raëlians object to this label by claiming that these extraterrestrials are not fundamentally different from us, but simply more technologically advanced, though this seems like a poor distinction since the notion that people can become gods is not absent from supernatural religions like Mormonism. For Raëlians, greater technology fills the role of magic in most older religions.
Raëlianism and science
Raëlian apologists for creationism tend to make many of the same arguments as other Intelligent Design proponents, differing primarily in that they substitute aliens for God.
Despite this, they are adamant supporters of science, at least nominally. However, they seem to have done little of any relevance to actually advance science, and seem more concerned with impressing the Elohim so that they can simply give us all of the answers that they have already discovered than they do with actually doing work to advance human knowledge.
The group made news when the Raëlian-owned company Clonaid claimed that it would attempt the creation of a human clone, and again when it subsequently claimed to have succeeded in doing so. They have, however, refused to submit their "clones" to genetic testing to "protect their privacy," which leads many to suspicion that they have not created human clones at all, and had ulterior motives for making this claim.
