Dr Brandon Reece Taylorian

When Margaret Robinson converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1886, her decision reshaped the lives of her husband and nine children. This article reconstructs the Robinsons’ conversion, their staggered three-year emigration from Lancashire to Utah, and the challenges they encountered upon arrival, drawing on a previously unpublished family account by Robinson’s granddaughter. Particular attention is given to the family’s reliance on missionaries and the fraught relationship with Isaac J. Riddle, whose simultaneous reputation as a devoted missionary and exploiter of immigrant children highlights the moral complexity of late-nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint settlement. The article further situates the Robinsons’ account within broader patterns of Latter-day Saint migration by comparing it to the much earlier emigration of the Moon family in 1840. This comparison underscores shifting doctrines of “the gathering” and illuminates the strengths and limitations of how family memory frames narratives of sacrifice, betrayal, and faith across generations.

Under international law, states are granted allowances to dissolve religious organizations, but only for select reasons based on narrow circumstances. However, a trend over the last twenty years has seen state authorities over-exercise their margins of appreciation by forcibly dissolving religious organizations on baseless grounds while claiming the dissolutions were for legitimate reasons that comply with international standards. This article analyzes the prevalence of forced dissolution and its impacts on the freedoms of a range of religious communities, especially members of minority religions and new religious movements. It also considers the legitimacy of the reasons found permissible under international law for states to dissolve religious organizations. A spectrum is introduced to grade the rights violations faced by religious communities following the dissolution of their legal organizations, to better understand the implications for the conditions of freedom of religion or belief. Reviews of three relevant cases lodged against Azerbaijan and Russia are conducted to show how dissolution cases arise and what guidance the Strasbourg Court is dispensing on best practices for states when dissolving religious organizations.

How governments recognise and register religious groups is a reasonable concern to those monitoring human rights records, given how often recognition and registration policies discriminate based on religion or belief. This thesis identifies the frequency, severity and variety of recognition and registration issues across diverse cultural, political and religious contexts. Using case studies, it develops ways of measuring the degree to which recognition and registration issues impact conditions of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). It concludes that recognition and registration play a significant role in limiting or interfering with the freedom of religious communities. The findings presented in this thesis stem from a series of interviews conducted with members of minority religions and human rights professionals. The participants explained what recognition and registration issues they believe are most pressing. The issues that participants considered crucial were states limiting access to legal personality, criminalising unregistered religious activity, making registration onerous, using information gathered during registration to surveil religious services and deregistering groups if they fail to conform to state regulations. The thesis analyses the interplay between recognition and registration and explores the extent to which recognition policy influences how groups fare before, during and after they have registered. State recognition appears to be a permanent fixture in state-religion relations. It also tends to worsen the impacts of registration due to the widespread practice of states giving special privileges to favoured denominations. Although registration has a legitimate function in regulating groups that are fraudulent or harmful, how registration policies are developed and applied is often not conducive to pluralism, especially if there is a narrow recognition policy that prevents communities from registering. Although the study finds the most drastic impacts to appear in authoritarian states, recognition and registration systems in democracies are not free of inequality and prejudice. The thesis synthesises various dimensions of FoRB by introducing the Spectrum of Religious Recognition (SRR-1), the Spectrum of Religious Registration (SRR-2) and the Scale of Rights Violations (SRV). Each can be used to rank countries on how severely their practices impact conditions of FoRB.

This article analyses two exercise books from the mid-Victorian period that once belonged to a pupil teacher named Joseph Prescott, who taught at St Mary’s School, a Catholic educational institution in Chorley, England. The exercise books act as a case study for curriculum structure and educational practice in Lancashire by highlighting several themes, including the role of religion in the Victorian school day. After addressing the deficiencies in accessing education in the Victorian period, the article contextualises the analysis of the exercise books by recounting the development of the pupil-teacher system in Britain. Key pages of the exercise books reflect the Catholic nature of the curriculum at St Mary’s School and show that educators of the period taught a range of subjects. The article addresses the role of the pupil-teacher system in mid-Victorian schooling, leading to a clearer understanding of the responsibilities and prospects of pupil teachers during the period.

This review critically engages Giulio Prisco’s Irrational Mechanics, a speculative and ambitious attempt to synthesise futurist science and metaphysical inquiry into a new religious vision. Prisco’s narrative reimagines Newtonian rationality through a quasi-theological framework that champions transcendent technologies—time travel, resurrection, faster-than-light propulsion—as the metaphysical infrastructure of a post-scientific age. The review situates Prisco’s work within the emerging discourse of space religions, drawing comparisons and contrasts with Astronism, particularly on issues of revelation, grace, morality, and institutional coherence. While praising the imaginative scope and cosmic ambition of Irrational Mechanics, the review critiques its lack of revelatory grounding, ethical orientation, and structural clarity, suggesting these as essential components for any enduring religious system. The review positions Prisco’s work as a provocative, if incomplete, contribution to the growing constellation of philosophies and theologies seeking to unite science, spirituality, and the human future in space.

In July 2024, the Astronist Institution published a video on TikTok that, within a week, amassed thousands of views and, up to that point, was the single largest exposure to the public that Astronism received after being founded in 2013. Since being posted, the video has received over 77,000 views, over 1,150 likes, over 120 comments and 297 shares on the platform. The mixed response to the video among members of the public prompts the question: How have people reacted to Astronism so far online? By scouring the internet for reactions to the story of how Astronism was founded and Astronist beliefs and practices, this article answers that question. In turn, it develops an ethnography of Astronists and non-Astronists about their initial response to content published by the Astronist Institution. The article begins by focusing on the “What is Astronism?” video posted on TikTok but broadens its scope to address reactions to Astronism appearing on other platforms. The aim is to analyse comments on the TikTok video and elsewhere to understand early forms of Astronist self-identification, lines of criticism against Astronist doctrine and the themes that people tend to raise whenever they discuss Astronism.

During the New Imperialism (1884–1920) period, an attitude pervaded the Western mindset that non-Christian religions were inferior and unsophisticated. At the heart of the colonialist view was ‘the white man’s burden’ of civilising primitive societies, including converting Indigenous peoples to Christianity. This aim escalated into a conscious effort among colonial powers to exert dominance over their subjects by othering and stereotyping non-Christians by presenting their religions through the prism of exoticism and orientalism. This article explores how colonialism accelerated modern recognition and registration issues for religious communities and continues to influence state-religion relations today, including how governments restrict religious freedom.

In 1653, Edward Moon, a husbandman of the Fylde coast, his wife Isabel and three of their sons left the Church of England to join the Religious Society of Friends which had been founded as a result of a vision George Fox had experienced on nearby Pendle Hill just a year earlier. The Moons were fined, distrained of their property and imprisoned in Lancaster Castle for their newfound adherence to Quakerism. However, Edward’s son Thomas attempted to escape persecution by migrating south to Bristol where he raised two sons John and Paul who eventually established a leatherworks business in the city. While his brother John emigrated to Pennsylvania with other Quakers, Paul remained in Bristol, becoming a prominent Quaker there and published two notable broadsides advocating his beliefs, the first A Visitation of Love to All People in 1681 which he wrote while imprisoned in Newgate gaol and the second God’s Controversy in 1693 which he wrote while on a preaching tour in Ireland. In 1696, Moon served as a witness at the second wedding of William Penn to Hannah Callowhill while an analysis of his writings reveal that he made some contributions to early Quaker literature.

On June 6, 1840, the Britannia set sail from the docks at Liverpool bound for New York City with twenty-one-year-old Henry Moon aboard, sitting among thirty-nine other converts to the Latter-day Saint movement, over a dozen of whom were Henry’s relatives in the Moon family. Henry and his fellow British Saints nervously anticipated their journey to the American promised land. This voyage was the first of its kind as it was transporting the earliest emigrant members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from their humble origins in the farmlands of Lancashire to the industrial streets of New York, eventually headed for the location of their prophet Joseph Smith Jr. who, by 1840, had fled Pennsylvania with his most loyal followers to Illinois to escape persecution. What awaited the Mormon Moons upon their arrival in the United States a month and a half later put their newfound faith to the test.

The Handbook of Family History Methods is a short publication created by University of Lancashire Research Associate Brandon Reece Taylorian. It follows The Handbook of Antique Photographs, published in 2024, by broadening its remit to address best practices in family history research based on Taylorian's personal research journey. The handbook features tips and tricks on all aspects of the family history research process, including how to acquire resources like birth, marriage and death certificates, the importance of newspapers and other secondary sources to family history research, the role of religion in family history and other key topics of interest to family historians. Beyond the practical information it conveys, The Handbook of Family History Methods promotes a broader philosophy about family history: that family history can be used as a mode of inquiry to produce insights relevant to historians. The underlying message of the handbook is that, for too long, family history has been undervalued as an avenue for historical research. Taylorian uses examples from his academic research stemming from his discoveries in family history to promote the idea that family history can be made relevant beyond family members and has the potential to provide unique, in-depth insights on a range of topics significant in broader society and humanities research.

Hearing a divine voice is a type of supernatural experience recognised in religions the world over. In Catholicism, a handful of saints and blesseds have reported experiencing locutions while some mystics have conducted theological inquiry into these divine communications. Locutions are not confined to the history books but continue as private revelation, a recent example being the locutions of Derrick Taylor which acted as the case study in this research. An English convert and post-conciliar traditionalist, Mr Taylor claimed to experience two sessions of locution during his lifetime (first in 1971 and again in 1978), both addressing his disillusionment with the Church hierarchy during the implementation of reforms to the Tridentine liturgy after the Second Vatican Council. The first was a locution brought about by the intermediation of the Sacred Heart while the second was spoken by the voice of a deceased priest who had been Mr Taylor’s confessor. Deconstructing each of Mr Taylor’s locutionary accounts and comparing them to past reports of locution tested them according to criteria established by mystics to help ascertain their authenticity.

Over the past two decades, the Strasbourg Court has received more than two dozen cases involving states denying access to legal personality for religious or belief organisations or otherwise misusing the mechanism of registration to impose undue limits on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). Most of these cases have resulted in the Court ruling in favour of the applicant by determining such policies and practices as violations of Article 9. Moreover, with the publication in 2014 of the Joint Guidelines on the Legal Personality of Religious or Belief Communities by the joint actions of the Venice Commission and the OSCE, one might assume that issues surrounding recognition and registration have been settled but this would be an inaccurate assessment. The complex disputes over registration that continue to reach the ECtHR, combined with guidelines that are either outdated in parts or vague on key issues, demand that the attention of human rights organisations turns again to the discussion of recognition and registration with a view to developing a new standards document. This article looks back at the guidance the Strasbourg Court has dispensed on cases involving the recognition or registration of religious or belief organisations to reflect on the inadequacy of the criteria used by the Court to determine the permissibility of registration laws. This article also analyses the 2014 OSCE Guidelines to form a series of critical judgements intended to confirm the need for updated international guidance so that legal scholars, policymakers and judges can ascertain with greater precision at what specific points recognition and registration policies and practices contravene FoRB.

In 1973, the Taylor family of 222 Longmeanygate on the outskirts of Leyland joined the Saint Pius V Association under the Superiorship of Father Peter Morgan and funded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Mr Derrick Taylor and Mrs Irene Mary Taylor defied their bishop by hosting priests of the Saint Pius V Association at their home called the Leyland Mass Centre from 1974 to 1978 due to their belief that the Tridentine Rite of the Mass was the true Mass and must be celebrated in Latin despite changes implemented following the Second Vatican Council that allowed for the Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular and with the Mass streamlined under Pope Paul VI. However, their actions in the 1970s were preceded by a long series of events that steam from Mr and Mrs Taylor's childhoods which this book details and in many ways celebrates. This short book provides a timeline of the lives of Mr and Mrs Taylor, using illustrations wherever possible to explain and visualise the significant events (some of which were supernatural) that shaped their beliefs. Each of the illustrations included in this work were commissioned by Mr and Mrs Taylor's grandson Cometan and created by British artist David Young who has been explaining the Taylor's story in the form of illustrations over the last five years. This work is a testament to Mr and Mrs Taylor's dedication to the Latin Mass despite the ridicule they faced and using intimate details about their lives helps to explain why they made their decisions and took controversial action at different stages of their lives.

The Compendium of the Life and Genealogy of Cometan is a compilation of years of family history research conducted by Cometan on his maternal and paternal ancestry. The book is formatted as an index of individual family members with key biographical details, photographs and extracts from various sources collected over the years. The book has over 300 pages of life stories of members of the Cottam, Moon, Prescott, Taylor and Warbrick families. The life stories include religious conversions, tragic deaths, details of married life, the births of children, burials, poetry, interviews, extracts of newspaper articles, paintings, wartime stories, emigration, illustrations of key events, religious tracts, details of people’s careers, pictures of gravestones and letters. This book embodies an ethnography of the lives of several families in Lancashire using a methodology of family history.

In April 1658, a Lancastrian currier named John Moon claimed to receive a revelation from Jesus Christ that affirmed many tenets taught by the English Dissenter George Fox. Moon, along with his parents, brother and uncle, joined the Religious Society of Friends in 1653, a year after Fox’s vision on Pendle Hill, not far from the Moon’s homeland on the plains of the Fylde. This portion of the Moon family received instant reprisal for converting to the new movement. However, imprisonments, fines and the seizure of his possessions did not stop John from publishing several works affirming his newfound beliefs. Still, scholars remain in dispute over parts of the history of the Moon family’s conversion. This article investigates the early history of Quakerism in Lancashire with special attention given to John Moon’s literary works which may warrant his recognition as a Quaker leader key to the propagation of the movement.

In Paris in August 1839, the French government revealed a gift free of charge that would change the world forever. This gift was the daguerreotype process which had been invented by artist Louis Daguerre who used an iodine-sensitised silvered plate and mercury vapour to create some of the world’s earliest photographs and soon afterwards commercial photography was born. The trend of taking photographs spread quickly across the English Channel, but competition was fierce over the next several decades to develop new methods of creating clearer images for less expense and with reduced exposure times. Victorian society embraced the technology of photography and much of the work conducted by family historians today revolves around identifying relatives in nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs. This article explores the history of portrait photography followed by an analysis of the ambrotype, tintype, cartes de visite and cartes postale found in the collection of the Moon/Prescott family from Lancashire which will provide a practical guide to dating and interpreting antique photographs.

The 2024 Global Religious Recognition Report is a compilation of the most recent available data on recognition and registration impacting conditions of religious freedom throughout the world. Each page of the 259-page report is dedicated to each sovereign state and dependent or disputed territory, including an overview of the constitutional structure, secularity and recognition and registration policies and practices. Detailed explanations of registration policy have been gathered from the Office of International Religious Freedom's International Religious Freedom Report in addition to other credible sources. The RoRB classification for each country and territory has been updated in accordance with the criteria set out in the Spectrum of Religious Recognition (SRR) which was included towards the front of this year's report. This year's report includes an abridged version of Dr Monica Gyimah's article (the full article can be found in Journal of Astronist Studies Volume 1 Issue 1) that highlights recognition and registration issues specifically impacting indigenous religious communities.

Celestial bodies have long been a source of religious objectification and this article aims to convey the origin of the relationship between human religious belief and observations of the night sky. The academic search for the origin of religion commenced in the early nineteenth century and since then the debate of whether animism or pre-animism is the original religion has dominated this field. Until now, no unified theory has acknowledged the influence of primitive astronomy on the origin of religion. However, the theory of Astronicism supports the pre-animist hypothesis by proposing that early modern humans of the Upper Palaeolithic made simple associations between celestial bodies and their apparent capacity to determine human survival. This article asserts that these associations led to celestial deification long before humans animated astronomical phenomena with spirits. Archaeological specimens from Europe and beyond including astral rock art, cup marks and engravings are used in this article to assert that astrolatry and astromancy were crucial to the development of religion.

In April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to journey beyond Earth’s atmosphere and enter outer space. This achievement cemented the status of the Soviet Union as a global superpower and intensified its race with the United States to be the first nation to put a person on the Moon. However, what many people are far less aware of is that a proto-transhumanist and quasi-religious movement in the nineteenth century laid the philosophical foundations for the Space Race. At the same time, the writings of its main proponents continue to inspire beliefs at the confluence of religion, space exploration and spirituality. This movement was called Cosmism and was spearheaded by an unusual character named Nikolai Fyodorov, a librarian from Moscow whose idiosyncrasies became just as notorious as his radical beliefs about humanity colonising the Milky Way and using science to resurrect the dead. Fyodorov’s Common Task set out a grand plan for humanity’s future, one in which Homo sapiens would become a spacefaring species and construct a utopian civilisation among the stars. In 1953, Israeli political theorist Mordechai Nessyahu founded Cosmodeism which advocated a similar endeavour of human expansion into the extraterrestrial world but focused its beliefs around the prophecy that spaceflight will see humans eventually become gods in a presently godless cosmos. However, new developments have begun to take place in space religion in the twenty-first century with the youngest religion having been founded only a decade ago in 2013 whose followers are known as Astronists. Astronism repackages human space expansion as a sacred endeavour called transcension, the object of which is to see humanity escape the cosmos entirely and thus relieve itself of all limitations. Studying the interplay between these three space religions will demonstrate how they have contributed to art and film, astronautics and spaceflight, philosophy and literature.

The 1960s and 1970s in Britain was a time of revolution in attitudes towards sex, especially in the public education system. The campaign to see sex education established as a subject in primary and secondary schools was gaining traction despite fierce opponents like Mary Whitehouse. This article focuses on the story of a traditionalist Catholic couple named Mr Derrick Taylor and Mrs Irene Taylor who set up a campaign to defend their children against what they saw as the encroachment of immorality, promiscuity and pornography. Mrs Taylor worked to spread the message that sex education was wrong by building a network of mothers who shared her views while Mr Taylor defended in court his decision to remove his children from school altogether. This article gives an account of the lengths Mr and Mrs Taylor went to in order to try to stop sex education and describes the impacts this campaign had on their children.

The Handbook of Antique Photographs is a short publication created by UCLan Associate Lecturer Brandon Reece Taylorian as part of his Dating Antique Photographs Project funded by UCLan's Institute of Creativity, Communities and Culture. The Handbook begins with a brief history of the origins of portrait photography followed by Taylorian's introduction of a step-by-step method for deconstructing and dating antique photographs ('antique' is defined in the Handbook as referring to any photograph that is more than 100 hundred years old). The Handbook then goes on to provide details on each type of nineteenth-century photograph from the earliest type daguerreotypes to ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards and cartes postale with examples given for each. Each of the sections includes details on fashion and style of the period, the composition and settings for photographs and the items portrait subjects commonly held. The Handbook concludes by outlining the useful role that photographer logos and royal warrants can play in helping family historians to estimate when their nineteenth-century photographs were taken.

Violations of religious freedom resulting from how states arrange their recognition and registration policies continue to escalate around the world. States might seek to regulate the religious activities of their citizens and recognition and registration are convenient tools in this pursuit. Registration is sometimes made mandatory; groups may be barred from accessing it and what they must do to first obtain and then to maintain registered status can be onerous. Such restrictive policies serve to preserve a religious or political hegemony by filtering out religions and beliefs deemed unfavourable and unworthy of recognition. After surveying the ways recognition and registration are misused, this article contends that more definitive international standards are necessary to supersede ambiguous guidelines. Furthermore, this article deliberates over the plausibility that recognition, as a mode of state–religion relations, might still have the potential to facilitate freedom of religion or belief. This relies on whether a state uses recognition to facilitate all religions and beliefs by reducing deep-set favouritism and any administrative hurdles imposed during registration.

The principal finding of the doctoral research of Cometan (a.k.a. Brandon Reece Taylorian) was that the ways governments, both authoritarian and democratic, use their powers to recognise religions and beliefs and register religious or belief organisations is negatively impacting conditions of freedom of religion or belief. Cometan explored the range of recognition and registration issues plaguing religious freedom and other human rights and discovered that there lacks a definitive set of international standards to address some of the granular topics that are causing registration procedures in particular to become onerous and thus impedimental to the free and legal exercise of religion or belief. Cometan's International Religious Rights and Standards (IRRS) document presents a series of standards for how nation states ought to develop their recognition and registration policies and practices to remain FoRB-compliant. The standards of the IRRS document have been created based on the results of Cometan's PhD research, the thesis for which is titled Religious Freedom and State Recognition of Belief. Cometan's intention is that the IRRS document will encourage international organisations like the OSCE and the United Nations as well as national and international human rights courts such as the ECtHR to establish more detailed and country-specific guidelines to address the breath of registration issues and the recognition issues that often worsen such issues.

In the 1960s, the Catholic Church made changes to its liturgy and ecumenical outlook during the Second Vatican Council. These changes sparked a small counter-revolution called the Traditionalists led by rebel Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to keep the Latin Mass. My grandparents Derrick and Irene Taylor opened their home to the movement during the 1970s, offering their time, money and land for SSPX masses. They received backlash from modernist Catholics and Church leaders but held to their belief that the Traditionalists were to save the Church. My research has sought to uncover why my grandparents involved themselves in the movement.

The Global Religious Recognition Report (GRR Report) returns for its second edition, this year including more detail on each country and territory's registration policies and on their practices of states extending privileges to some religions and beliefs and not others. Recognition and registration issues continue to impact conditions of freedom of religion or belief throughout the world and it is the purpose of the GRR Report to highlight the extent of these issues nation by nation as part of the report's country-specific approach to the subject. Detailed explanations of registration policy have been gathered from the Office of International Religious Freedom's International Religious Freedom Report in addition to other credible sources. The RoRB classification for each country and territory has been updated in accordance with the criteria set out in the Spectrum of Religious Recognition (SRR) which was included towards the front of this year's report. With more detail provided this year on registration policy in each nation, this report has revealed the complexity of registration issues and the drastic impacts they have on religious freedom.

Cometan began writing the Omnidoxy, the founding text of Astronism, at the age of seventeen in 2015 and this first great treatise of the Astronist religion was published in 2019. Since then, the world has been introduced to Astronism and its central doctrine of transcension and its worldview of cosmocentrism but the time has come to reflect on the Omnidoxy. The Astronist System explores the major themes of the Omnidoxy including cosmic organicism, astrogenism, returnism and transcension and provides rigorous detail on various aspects of Astronist philosophy, theology, spirituality, eschatology and soteriology. In this reflective work, Cometan also takes the time to analyse what the founding text of Astronism achieved and the legacy it has left behind for the worldwide Astronist community. Cometan's reflections on the Omnidoxy text from his current vantage point allow him to close the chapter on the Omnidoxy so that he can move forward with his writing and eventual publication of the next great Astronist treatise titled the Astrodoxy which Cometan has already titled the central text of Astronism.

When the Second Vatican Council took place in the 1960s, it catapulted the Catholic Church into the modern, removing some of its old customs and rejuvenating the liturgy for an audience of a truly global Catholic community. Although the Council brought with it many considerable positive changes, there were those who opposed the changes who preferred to keep to the "old ways"; these people were known as traditionalists. Two such traditionalists were the paternal grandparents of Cometan (Founder of Astronism), Derrick Taylor (1930–2011) and Irene Mary Taylor (1932–2015). In their isolated house down the rambling Longmeanygate just west of the town of Leyland in Lancashire, Derrick and Irene Taylor hosted Tridentine Masses performed by Father Peter Morgan during the 1970s. This book, Traditionalist Catholicism: A New Dawn, provides detailed information about the life stories of this traditionalist couple, particularly how they dealt with the changes to their religion.

The initial foundations to the notion that Cometan's grandparents, Irene Mary Taylor and Derrick Taylor, should be recognised for their life as laypeople in the Roman Catholic Church first emerged in January 2020 and October 2021 respectively. Irene Mary was well known for her devotion to Catholicism among her family and acquaintances, yet Cometan saw in her icon and life events an opportunity to reinvigorate Catholic fervour in England and abroad. In his own endeavour as a religious figure and philosopher as the founder of Astronism, Cometan had made it clear that his paternal grandmother had played a large role in his religious life from infancy and so Irene Mary's Cause for Beatification was the culmination of this destined religious figureship. The Beatification Story of Irene Mary Taylor holds the responsibility of presenting Irene Mary for the recognition in the Roman Catholic Church in whichever capacity the Church deems suitable. The book explores the major remembered life events of Irene Mary Taylor, relates them to Catholic doctrine, and systematises them to form Irenianism, Irene Mary's eponymous Catholic system of thought.

The Astronist Statement on the Situation of the Human Species, often simply referred to as The Astronist Statement, is a non-technical manifesto of the Astronist philosophy and religion, altogether referenced as the Astronist belief system. It provides a summary of the Astronist perspective on the human condition as this pertains to and is influenced by the ultimate goals of Astronism and the purposes it prescribes to human life through its doctrines on transcension, cosmocentrism, suronality and astrosis. The Astronist Statement is made equivalent to other kinds of theological or ideological manifestos in that it outlines the fundamental problems that Astronism sees effecting the human species and presents solutions to these problems identified. The underlying principle of The Astronist Statement and thereby, all Astronism, is that due to the pervading cosmic limitation, human beings both individually and collectively are limited in our capacities to do and be. This means that the human species is inherently though not hopelessly limited which is pinpointed as the underlying reason for all the suffering, evil and wrongdoing in the world. It is the goal of the Astronist religion to extinguish human limitation because in humanity, Astronism sees the potential for transcension meaning that humanity may one day, via our expansion into the astronomical world, transverse the boundaries of cosmic limitation to become unlimited beings possessing total freedom and thereby having also extinguished our woes of suffering and evil. The Astronist Statement conveys this message of humanity's capacity to transverse limitation via the salvific process of transcension, an endeavour that has indeed become the central dogma of the Astronist religion and thereby the central goal and life purpose of all Astronists.