At the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies, Mike Treder blogs about a March 2009 talk given by Georgetown law professor Steven Goldberg about whether transhumanism—the belief that technology should be used to augment and even transform human biology in radical ways—constitutes a religion. Says Goldberg:
So perhaps a full-blown transhumanist movement should not resist being analogized to religion. It should embrace the analogy and struggle openly to be accepted as ultimate truth. Otherwise why is transhumanism worth taking seriously?
Under this approach transhumanists would forgo being in the public school curriculum in order to be in everyone’s hearts and minds. They would openly compete in the private sphere with Christianity and other faiths. Or to take a more radical perspective, adherents might argue that transhumanism forces us to change the Constitutional rules: we finally have a truth that ought to be established, that ought, in other words, to be publicly funded and taught in public schools. There should be no wall between transhumanism and the state.
To an outside observer like myself it seems that either of these approaches would be true to the actual claims of transhumanism. These approaches are more honest than claiming that the teachings of transhumanism are merely like the curriculum of a chemistry course or a survey course on Western philosophy. If transhumanism is really worthy of the attention of a non-transhumanist like me, it ought to be willing to take its place as a contender for America’s soul.
Read more at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies.