When Silicon Valley Gets Religious About Not Dying

In 1973, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for "The Denial of Death," which argued that an enormous share of human religion, culture, and personal ambition functions as a defense against the terror of dying — what he called an "immortality project." That framing predates any of the technology on this site by decades, and it's a useful lens here: some of the biggest names in longevity aren't just avoiding that pattern with science, they're consciously building new belief systems on top of it.

The clearest example is the Terasem Movement Foundation, founded by Martine Rothblatt — the entrepreneur behind Sirius Satellite Radio and CEO of the biotech company United Therapeutics — along with her wife, Bina Rothblatt. Terasem describes itself in explicitly spiritual terms, built around a small set of stated beliefs that treat consciousness as transferable information, hold that death is optional rather than inevitable, and frame technology itself as a path toward something like transcendence. The organization built Bina48, a humanoid robot loaded with a "mindfile" of Bina Rothblatt's recorded memories and personality, which has since given interviews and appeared in art exhibitions — a working, if crude, prototype of the idea explored more seriously in our piece on mind uploading.

The Mormon Transhumanist Association, founded in 2006, makes the connection even more directly through existing religious doctrine rather than a new one. Its members — many of them practicing Latter-day Saints — point to a long-standing LDS teaching about eternal progression, the idea that humans can develop toward a god-like state over an endless span of time, and argue that radical life extension and technological enhancement are simply tools for pursuing a goal their theology already commits them to. Co-founder Lincoln Cannon has written extensively on this synthesis, framing transhumanism not as a rejection of faith but as an implementation of it.

Giulio Prisco's Turing Church draws from an older, stranger source: Russian cosmism, a 19th-century philosophical and spiritual movement whose central figure, Nikolai Fyodorov, argued that humanity's ultimate moral obligation was to use science to literally resurrect the dead. Prisco's project updates that impulse for an era of AI and computation, but the core idea — that immortality is a spiritual duty achievable through technology, not a miracle to wait for — is over a century old.

Not everyone finds this inspiring. Critics gave the whole cluster of belief a deliberately mocking label: "the Rapture of the Nerds," a phrase that stuck partly because it's accurate — singularity and mind-uploading narratives borrow the shape of religious apocalypse and salvation stories almost point for point, just with servers instead of angels. And mainstream religious traditions have their own, older objections: various Christian theologians have raised concerns about radical life extension overstepping a role they consider reserved for the divine, while Buddhist teaching on impermanence and non-self sits in direct tension with the entire premise of preserving a fixed, permanent self indefinitely.

Whether you read any of this as visionary or as an old instinct wearing new technology, the pattern is worth taking seriously for the same reason as everything else on this site: real money and real institutional effort are following it, which makes it worth understanding rather than dismissing.