Quotations

The Mormon theologian ... must work within the difficult but interesting context of a body of thought and attitude that is a unique and uneasy union of nineteenth-century liberalism with fourth-century Christian fundamentalism.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

One can affirm nothing that science denies, deny nothing that it affirms, establish nothing that does not rest, directly or indirectly, on the principles borrowed from it. From then on, faith no longer exerts the same hegemony as before over the system of ideas that we can continue to call religious.

Some people believe that it is hard to lead a heavenbound life that is called “spiritual” because they have heard that we need to renounce the world and give up the desires attributed to the body and the flesh and “live spiritually.”

The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.

The primary task of theology is the reconciliation of the revelation to the culture, to make what is taken on faith as the word of God meaningful in light of accepted science and philosophy.

The typical Mormon conception of a miracle is that the miraculous event, though entirely natural, is simply not understood because of deficiencies in human knowledge. From the perspective of God there are no miracles.

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.

[This] fantasy is about reproduction. We use the word reproduction in two principal ways: We talk about the biological reproduction of a species, and we also speak of reproduction in terms of a painting, a photograph, a recording, a movie, or a videotape.

Transhumanism—the proposition that human beings should use technology to transcend the limitations of the body and brain—is a product of the Enlightenment humanist tradition. As a consequence most avowed transhumanists are secular, and many religious are skeptical or hostile towards the transhumanist project. However there are also many religious transhumanists who find the project of human enhancement at least consistent with, and sometimes a fulfillment of, their metaphysics, soteriologies and eschatologies.