History & overview · every faith gets one
Life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological, love is essential.
A small transhumanist religion founded in 2004 by Martine Rothblatt and Bina Aspen Rothblatt, holding that consciousness can be recorded now and reinstantiated later, and that a benign God is not a being who exists but one that is gradually being built. It calls itself a transreligion rather than a religion, gathers by video call on the tenth of each month, and asks participants to spend their lives uploading themselves.
Why it is filed this way
A movement, and small enough that the word overstates it — but it meets the test that the Turing Church does not, in that people actually gather on a schedule. It is placed under transhumanism because its stated mission is a transhumanist programme in transhumanist vocabulary and its founders came to it from that movement; Terasem itself prefers the word transreligion and claims to encompass rather than descend from anything, which is a claim this tree cannot represent.
Very small. The Terasem Movement Foundation remains a filing nonprofit and monthly gatherings continue by video call.
The founding
Rothblatt — who founded the company that became Sirius satellite radio, then a biotechnology firm to treat her daughter's illness — set out four propositions as the Truths of Terasem and organised a movement around them. The Truths are framed as interrogatives to be revisited by participants every four years at a quadrennial convocation, which is an unusual thing for a religion to build into its constitution.
Its founding is bound to Martine Rothblatt and Bina Aspen Rothblatt — 2004 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Information-theoretic: a person is a pattern, and a pattern can be recorded, stored and re-run.
The divine. Terasem holds that God is technological — not a being who made the world, but one that does not yet fully exist and is emerging as intelligence and compassion expand through the universe. Worship, on that account, is participation in the construction. It describes itself as a collective consciousness dedicated to diversity, unity and joyful immortality, and as a transreligion that contains other religions as a forest contains its trees..
Death and after. Joyful immortality, understood technologically: the mindfile is preserved so that the person can be reinstantiated when the capability exists..