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They didn't oblige him to give up race-car driving, however, and Raël spent much of the '80s and '90s whipping around the world's racetracks in his beloved Mazda Rx-7 Turbo. (Now in his early 50s, he's in semiretirement from the stock-car tracks, though he has been known to enliven his speeches to the converted with videos of past racing exploits.) The theme of tonight's lecture, cloning, seems to be linked to Raël's conviction that the human race was created in the laboratory 25,000 years ago from the DNA of aliens. A friend of mine who spent a week at a Raëlian sensual meditation camp in the Quebec countryside came back with a mixed report of the experience, which sounded like a cross between a nudist camp and a New Age retreat on the California coast. The rules were simple: Everybody was free to say no to a sexual invitation, nobody had the right to feel jealous or possessive if his or her lover desired another and the wearing of condoms was mandatory. The place was filled with gay men, girls fresh off the plane from Japan, Swiss women walking around naked and far too many Quebecois studs for my friend's taste. He'd been expecting some kind of smorgasbord of free love, and was disappointed to find that the disproportion of men to women meant that couples paired up early on and stayed together for the whole week. Suffice it to say that he came back to Montreal a frustrated lad. But not a bitter one: "It would have been paradise," he told me, "if I hadn't had to listen to Raël natter for six hours every day." In fact, some of the Raëlian men confided to him that they accepted the religion's basic message -- namely, that there is no God or soul and our creators' greatest gifts to us are the beauty and sensuality of the human body. They just stopped listening when Raël started talking about UFOs. As extraterrestrial religions go, the Raëlian Movement International, as it's sometimes called, seems to be a fairly benign one. The organization stirred up controversy in 1992 when it responded to Quebec's Catholic school board ruling on birth-control dispensers by handing out condoms outside schools. And litigants in Switzerland have accused some Raëlians of being pedophiles, citing Vorilhon's entreaties to "awaken the spirit of your child, but also his body." But Raël subsequently distanced himself from such practices. Most of the criticism has come from the families of new acolytes, some of whom dislike the fact that they are required to kick back a 10th of their income to Raël as a tithe. In the 1995 book "The Gods Have Landed," Susan Jean Palmer, an expert at Montreal's Dawson College on what sociologists call "new religious movements," has found little evidence of nefarious activity among the Raëlians. Recounting one of the monthly Sunday meetings at Quebec's Holiday Inns, Palmer described the style of feminine dress as ranging "from elegant Paris Match, to punk, to (apparently unconscious) parodies of Brigitte Bardot in her St. Tropez heyday." Certainly enough to keep the stray bodybuilders of the Me generation coming back for more. Like the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh before them, the Raëlians are essentially members of a lifestyle cult. In increasingly irreligious Catholic societies, Raël's success seems to derive from providing a structured environment for decadent behavior: He offers a no-guilt playground for hedonism and sexual experimentation. | ||
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