Religion and Rhetoric

[Recently I've been reading a lot of philosophical anarchism, which is all about questioning the authority of the state. Locke, Nozick, and others make sophisticated arguments to defend the legitimacy of the state's authority. No one seems to be doing the same for religion, though. This is my attempt at filling that gap. Comments are very welcome.]

Where does religion's authority come from? All religions proclaim to tell the Truth, but if you are to ask an average religious person why you should believe they'll say, because The Holy Book said so. If you question further they'll say, you just need to have to have faith. The discusion usually stops there. Intelligent people, who need to have good reason before believing in something, have naturally come to have totally written off religion. 

I think people who offer these sorts of explanations do religion a large disservice. It's mispresentation, really. This answer is the child's answer, but for some reason it's still pretty much the only one offered to curious and skeptical people.

The adult answer grounds itself in the idea that religion is rhetoric. Religion is essentially an argument for a way of life, and like all arguments it needs to develop its logos, pathos, and ethos. The first two elements are obvious components of religions. It's the last one, ethos, that seems more elusive.

So where is the appeal to ethos in religion? The answer is that it comes from the same place that ethos always comes from: the identity of the speaker. What religious leaders so often fail to mention—and what holds religion together in the first place—is the credibility, respect, and trustworthiness of both the founder of the religion and the religious leaders who maintain it. If religious figureheads preach a standard that they don't live up to themselves, then thinking people will naturally reject that religion as false.

In Hinduism, there is a saying: When the student asks for guidance, the teacher tells her to go to the Scripture, and the Scripture tells her to go to the teacher. The idea is that the two are mutually reinforcing; the theoretical ideas of moral behavior find a living example in the teacher.

The purpose of religion is to make us better human beings. It's a system for self-improvement and inner development and transformation. Of course, people may become worse in the name of religion, but there are also lots of quiet but inspiring inner self-unfoldments taking place because of it too. Swami Chinmayananda, my own spiritual teacher, made the point that we can't judge religion by how bad religious people are, since after all if they had nothing to improve upon then religion would do them any good. Instead, he said, we should focus on the before-and-after, i.e. how much did they change by sincerely applying religious practices. That's the real test. In that sense, if there is even one person who has achieved significant self-improvement, then that validates the religion: it means that the religion, as a system for self-improvement, actually works.

Faith plays an important role in religion, but it's hardly anything more special than the faith we require to function in everyday life. In religion we need faith because we can't travel back in time to verify the accuracy of scriptures; because we have to trust our religious advisors; and, most importantly, because sometimes religious doctrine contradicts our intuitions. But we also have faith the same kind of faith in the science textbooks we use, in our spouses, and in our doctors and our medicines. It's nothing new.

Thus, choosing to follow a religion can be a very reasonable, considered decision. If I see that in history certain spiritual men and women have led unparalleled moral lives, and that they explain their thought processes, and that many people over the centuries have come to live great, inspired lives by following this system, then these present good reasons to me for trying the religion too. Why not? I can always test it out for a year, sincerely, under the direction of knowledgeable people, and see if it produces any results.

So where does religious authority come from? Consent, of course (the same place political authority comes from). We give religion our consent when we decide that sometimes religion knows what we want from life and how to achieve it more so than our own (faulty) intuitions do.