Raelism vs. Science: THE CLONE DILEMMA

According to Rael's e-book, Intelligent Design, an advanced race of extraterrestrial beings called the Elohim are able to achieve eternal life by cloning themselves indefinitely.

Rael writes, "a single living cell of each species, male and female, is all that is required to recreate a whole being. This is something like the first living cell of a fetus in the womb of its mother, which already possesses all the information needed to create a human being right down to the color of its eyes and hair" (p. 20).

According to Rael, Yahweh, the leader of the Elohim explained, "Our body lives on average, ten times longer than yours... Like the first people of the Bible, that is between 750 and 1,200 years. But our mind, our true self, can be truly immortal. I have already explained to you that, starting with any cell of the body, we can recreate the whole person with new living matter. When we are in full possession of our faculties and our brain is at its maximum level of efficiency and knowledge, we surgically remove a tiny sample of the body, which we then preserve. Then, when we really die, we take a cell from this preserved sample and recreate the body in full, just as it has been at the time the sample was taken. I say, 'as it had been at that time', meaning with all its scientific knowledge and, of course, its personality. But in this case, the body is made up of new elements with the potential for another one thousand years of life - and so on eternally" (p. 108-109).

It's further stated that an organism's cells "contain its physical and intellectual blueprint" (p. 153).

Rael adds in a FAQ, "if one can imagine an immortal soul escaping from the body after death - an image that is very poetic but rather naive since it comes from the minds of primitives - one cannot imagine where it would go, given that the universe in infinite. The quantity of energy that flies off at the time of death disperses in a random way, losing all identity as it blends with all the energies suspended in the surrounding air. That identity is obviously engraved only in organized matter, such as the cells of a living being that has just died. This matter is organized according to the blueprint, which the genes of the male and the female determined at conception while creating the first cell" (p. 155).

Finally, Yahweh couldn't have explained it better: "From a photo we can only make a replica of the physical body, with no psychological personality or almost none, whereas from a sample cell like the one we took from between your eyes, we can create a total replication of the individual whose cell we took, complete with the memory, personality and character." (p. 167)

Taken together, the above implies that memory is retrievable from any single cell of the body. But, we now know that it's possible to clone a living thing, which would basically make the clone a time-delayed identical twin of the host, i.e. the brain of the clone doesn't display the same neural connections reflecting life experience of the host. Instead, the clone would have a brain identical to the host's when it was born.

Rael apparently caught on to this, and so about 20 years later in his book, Yes to Human Cloning, he writes, "These clones are just physical copies. Like computer hardware or virgin cassettes, they have no memory or personality" (p. 36). He adds that we'll need to figure out a way accelerate the growth of the clone temporarily to grow into an adult and then to upload human memory and personality (up until the point of death) of the host into a computer to finally download it into the clone's brain (p. 37). So, this contradicts Rael's original writings which says the clone is recreated from a preserved cell taken at a "certain age" which contains "maximum scientific knowledge": "Everybody on our planet has a cell sample taken at a certain age, hoping that they will be chosen for re-creation after their death. In fact they not only hope for it, they try to earn this resurrection during their life." (p. 109)

Rael has been quoted saying: "Cloning will enable mankind to reach eternal life. The next step, like the ELOHIM with their 25,000 years of scientific advance, will be to directly clone an adult person without having to go through the growth process and to transfer memory and personality in this person. Then, we wake up after death in a brand new body just like after a good night sleep!" [1]

Sounds all good, doesn't it?

Well, no. We could certainly achieve all of the above some day, but that wouldn't be the same as *YOU* living eternally.

In his second book, Rael described how the Elohim took a cell sample from his forehead and produced an adult clone of himself (p. 167). They later destroyed (euphemism for killed) the clone explaining that it didn't bother the clone since he knew he was a clone. It's written, "At this moment there are two of you who are listening to me (Yahweh), and the personalities of these two beings are beginning to be different, because you (Rael) know that you are going to live, and he (clone) knows he is going to be destroyed" (p. 167). For Raelians this is proof of the non-existence of the ethereal soul.

But wait a minute. Did Rael see, hear or think through his clone? Nope.

He was right there looking at his clone... his consciousness didn't "jump into" or transfer into the clone. In other words, Rael didn't wake up in his clone. Sure, people would have a hard time telling Rael and his clone apart, but if Rael dies, his being would die with him. On the other hand, Rael's clone would indeed feel like nothing has changed and that he just woke up and *is* Rael. The clone will have memories of life experience, but it's the host that has actually lived it.

The same concept with uploading memory and personality into a computer - the computer entity would think it's you, but you are still you in your biological body. You'll be looking at your virtual-clone in the computer living eternally instead.

This technology may be useful to make use of the past life experiences of great people, but we will not be able to bring them back per se. Each clone may benefit from the life experiences of it's predecessor, but for each clone it is the end with its death.

Therefore, there's no point of wishing to ever get cloned and live eternally.

This also brings into question the following passage in Rael's book: "In this machine are kept the cells of malevolent people who will be recreated to be judged when the time comes... They will be recreated to undergo the punishment they deserve, after being judged by those whom they made to suffer or by their ancestors or descendants (p. 168).

Why torture the innocent clones? : (

Remember Rael's clone? Well, he was "destroyed" because he was "useless": "We could now send the other you back to Earth, and people would not notice a thing. But we are going to destroy this replica immediately, for it is of no use to us." (p. 167) But we've established from the above that every clone is an individual to itself... an exact clone will have past memories of things it didn't physically experience, nevertheless is an individual from the moment it starts living. Killing a clone is nothing short of murder.

Further Rael writes, "We could now send the other you back to Earth, and people would not notice a thing." (p. 167) But, we've also noted that clones are made of "new elements with the potential" to live another human life-time (p. 109)... had the Elohim sent Rael's clone back to Earth, that clone would've lived almost 30 years more than the "original" Rael. That would've been good evidence to have a centurian prophet to back up his fantastic claims. LOL


Advocatus Diaboli



[1] Quote from Clonaid's very first version of their website (July, 1997)

Checkout this excellent article: If I teleport from Mars, does the original me get destroyed?
It illustrates the dilemma of achieving eternal life with a very interesting thought experiment.