Ok, I was hoping that these would be actual break downs of the beliefs of transhumanists and how such point to the fact that they are a religion. Unfortunately, it was a lot less helpful then that.
Transhumanism, at least as expressed on this site (which hereafter I will just refer to as transhumanism), is as far as I can tell a religion. It is in fact a standard Abrahamic religion in form. Here is my reasoning for saying that:
1,) Belief in the elect. Transhumanists feel that they alone are rational enough to see the truth, to the point that some of them believe that it is better that others are not told the truth.
2.) Belief in God. Transhumanists believe that they will make a Friendly AI that will take the place of God.
3.) Belief in Resurrection. Transhumanists believe in Cryogenics such that when they die they will be frozen and eventually resurrected.
4.) Belief in Immortality. Transhumanists believe in life extension to the point that eventually their bodies will be able to live indefinitely long.
5.) Belief in Eternal Life. Transhumanists believe that eventually uploads will be possible such that even in the case of an unfortunate accident they will be able to survive.
6.) Belief in Theosis/Exaltation. Transhumanists believe that it may become possible to become one with their AI/God
7.) Belief that everyone that disagrees with them is a heretic. Aumann's Agreement theorem has serious problems in it, yet it is used in arguments as though it were true. If someone doesn't hold the “correct” beliefs about AI or other topics it is automatically assumed that they are less capable or less rational than those that do. This in spite of the fact that they may have additional information that is influencing their priors in important ways.
8) Sacred Symbols. At least those that are signed up for Cryonics have symbols that they wear and use to spark interest in their beliefs or debates about their beliefs.
9) Belief in the coming of a messiah - the singularity.
10) Holy Script - The sequences.
Ok, now that I have you fired up, please deconstruct this. Most especially try deconstructing this argument as though you were explaining things to someone that didn't understand the science or philosophic theories that these belief structures are built off of. Realize that many of the people on this site do not have the training to understand these theories as far as I can tell.
Whether "X is a religion" is not a very substantive query, particularly if category-membership is not clear. It's an argument about definitions, a rube/blegg question. An interesting question would be, say, whether lesswrong/transhumanists/rationalists are on an epistemic death spiral and will end up (or already are) comfortably compartmentalized (or not) deluded lunatics, like so many religious people. But this statement would need arguments focused on it in particular, and not just general reference class tennis that assigns connotationally rel...