# A Brief History of Religious Transhumanism

Transhumanism's roots lie in religious Humanism: from theosis and Fyodorov's Cosmism to Joseph Smith's proto-transhumanist theology and Julian Huxley's coinage of the word itself.

Although many transhumanists are non-religious, transhumanist origins actually extend back to religious Humanism, a long-standing effort at integrating humanistic ethical and scientific imperatives with religious forms, metaphysics, and communities. Indeed, the word “transhumanism” itself was coined by a thinker deeply engaged with religion, and some of the most thoroughly transhumanist theology of the nineteenth century was preached decades before the word existed.Religious Motivations for Scientific Advancement
The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.
The laws of nature are within the grasp of the human mind; God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.
Kepler's Platonic-solid model of the cosmos
God became man that man might become God.
God does everything not merely for humanity, but also through humanity. The Creator through us recreates the world; He resurrects all that are perished.
The purpose of creation as it must appear to us in our highest approaches to an understanding of it . . . is God’s movement toward self-reproduction.
A very real “pantheism” if you like (in the etymological meaning of the word) but an absolutely legitimate pantheism—for if, in the last resort, the reflective centers of the world are effectively “one with God,” this state is obtained not by identification (God becoming all) but by the differentiating and communicating action of love (God all in everyone).
Parley P. Pratt's Key to the Science of Theology, 1855
The present is an age of progress, of change, of rapid advance, and of wonderful revolutions … humanity seizes the lightning, tames and subdues it, and makes it the bearer of its thoughts and dispatches.
Truth is truth forever. Scientific truth cannot be theological lie. To the sane mind, theology and philosophy must harmonize. They have the common ground of truth on which to meet.
The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.
Gutenberg's printing press