History & overview · every faith gets one
We were made in a laboratory, and the makers left a forwarding address.
Founded by the French motoring journalist Claude Vorilhon, who said that on 13 December 1973, beside a volcanic crater outside Clermont-Ferrand, a small humanoid stepped out of a craft and explained that life on Earth was designed in a laboratory by a species called the Elohim. Raëlism is atheist by its own account — no gods, no souls, nothing supernatural — and its central request is that an embassy be built, with a landing pad, so that the makers can return openly.
Why it is filed this way
Raëlism has a founder, a scripture, an initiation, a clergy and a request of humanity, and denies being a religion in the supernatural sense while calling itself one in every other. It is filed as a movement on the structure rather than on the metaphysics.
The founding
Vorilhon published Le Livre qui dit la vérité in 1974 and founded MADECH, the association to welcome the makers, the same year. He took the name Raël — messenger — and the movement organised itself around one instruction he says he was given: build the embassy, and they will come.
Its founding is bound to Raël (Claude Vorilhon) — 1974 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A universe with no creator god — life on this planet was engineered by another species with better chemistry.
The divine. Explicitly atheist, and the movement says so before it says anything else. The Elohim are a technologically advanced species, not deities; Raëlians hold that the Hebrew word was mistranslated as God. Jesus, the Buddha, Moses and Muhammad are read as their messengers, and Raël as the last of them..
Death and after. No soul and no survival. Continuity, if any, is through cloning and the recording of the genetic code..