Aliens Adored: Raël's UFO Religion - Hardcover

Palmer, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813534755 ISBN 13: 9780813534756

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Aliens Adored is the first full length, in-depth look at the Raëlian movement, a fascinating new religion founded in the 1970s by the charismatic prophet, Raël. Born in France as Claude Vorilhon, the former race-car driver founded the religion after he experienced a visitation from the aliens (the "elohim") who, in his cosmology, created humans by cloning themselves. The millenarian movement awaits the return of the alien creators, and in the meantime seeks to develop the potential of its adherents through free love, sexual experimentation, opposition to nuclear proliferation and war, and the development of the science of cloning.

Sociologist Susan J. Palmer has studied the Raelian movement for more than a decade, observing meetings and rituals and enjoying unprecedented access to the group's leaders as well as to its rank-and-file members. In this pioneering study she provides a thorough analysis of the movement, focusing on issues of sexuality, millenarianism, and the impact of the scientific worldview on religion and the environment. Rael's radical sexual ethics, his gnostic anthropocentrism, and shallow ecotheology offer us a mirror through which we see how our worldview has been shaped by the forces of globalization, postmodernism, and secular humanism.

About this title

About the Author:

SUSANJ. PALMER teaches religious studies at Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec. She is the author of Moon Sisters, Krishna Mothers, Rajneesh Lovers: Women's Roles in New Religions and coedited Children in New Religions (Rutgers University Press).

From Booklist:

Palmer treats seriously a religious movement that many do not, thanks to its otherworldly philosophy that incorporates UFOs, openness toward sexuality, reliance on science over spirituality, and enthusiasm for human cloning. The International Raelian Movement was born in December 1973 in France when its founder, sports journalist Claude Vorilhon, encountered extraterrestrials who told him that life on earth was genetically manufactured (cloned) millennia ago by alien scientists from a saucerful of their own DNA. Vorilhon took the name Rael, moved to Montreal, and now claims to have 60,000 adherents in 60 countries. Palmer has researched the group since 1987, and she analyzes its organization, ethics, theology, prophecies, leaders, and followers, and compares it to other millennialist and UFO religions. A crucial chapter recounts its controversial 2002 announcement that its genetic laboratory, Clonaid, had produced the world's first cloned human. Hoax, hype, or breakthrough? Palmer has her suspicions but offers a generally objective account of the Raelians and the significance of their "bridg[ing] the cultural and cognitive gap between science and religion." George Eberhart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0813534755
• ISBN 13: 9780813534756
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 221