Richard Hughes Gibson at The Hedgehog Review:
I am not the first to propose that Transhumanism channels elements of Christian eschatology. In The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (1999), the science writer Margaret Wertheim argued that Transhumanists seek to “realize a technological substitute for the Christian afterlife” in “digital domains.” She documents, for example, Transhumanist hopes for “whole brain emulation,” whereby—as its most influential proponent, Hans Moravec, envisions it—a “robot brain surgeon” will download your “mind” tissue-layer by tissue-layer, after which you’ll wake up in a simulation. (The useless “meat” leftovers will be trashed.) One’s new cyber-body will now be “limitless” both in time and space, a hope that bears more than a passing resemblance to the “glorified” bodies promised by St. Paul. Moreover, a self made of bits could be backed up, making it possible for one’s “soul-data” to survive a crash or power outage. “As in the New Jerusalem,” Wertheim writes, “‘death would be no more.’”
more here.