This chapter considers the place of the human in the Enlightenment and in subsequent secularization and sacralization models. Humans are just lab rats or tissue samples, and their potential for development is dependent on possession of non-human genes. While some new religions share the Humanist high regard for the human, UFO and alien-based religions promote a lesser view of humans, due to their creation by aliens of higher intelligence in the ‘laboratory’ of earth.

The new religions may be interpreted as evidence of ‘reenchantment’ (sometimes termed desecularization) and of the dawn of a new ‘Axial Age’ of religious creativity. Yet the retreat of Christianity in the West created a neutral space in which new religions emerged. The initial telos of secularization was the demise of religion, and Humanism as a value system reflected the transition from a God-centred universe to a human-centred, disenchanted world. This chapter agues that the paramount importance of the human in the modern West results from prevalent Enlightenment rationalism and secularization, defined as ‘the process whereby sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’.

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