Leonard Reil

Leonard Reil, a founding member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, shares his reluctant conversion to transhumanism through a phrase his late father used in a church talk: “There is no magic wand.” His father taught that God transforms us through a collaborative process of repentance and change—not by supernatural fiat. Reil extends this principle to the physical realm: if God works by natural law rather than magic in spiritual redemption, why not in physical redemption as well? He argues that striving to understand resurrection, healing, and immortality through science and technology may be exactly what God expects of us.

Leonard Reil defends Joseph Smith’s bold doctrine of the plurality of gods, articulated in the prophet’s final sermon just weeks before his death at Carthage. Using the Godhead as his framework, Reil argues that the three types of divine beings—premortal spirits (like the Holy Ghost and premortal Christ), mortals engaged in God’s work (like Moses and Aaron), and post-mortal exalted beings (like Abraham)—reveal that “the gods” refers not to deities of other worlds but to the community of exalted beings who organized our spirits and our world. He envisions our future heaven as a continuation of our present sociality, suggesting that just as this earth will become our celestial home, so too the Father’s heaven is the shared domain of all those who attained godhood on a previous world.