A Religion of Ethics

You can have a religion of ethics that is not a religion of morality, but it is really difficult to separate them out, and the closest I have come to say what it might mean is that in the religion of ethics God is a word and not an idea. The greatest difficulty is not distinguishing between a being and an idea, but between an idea and a word. Of course words and ideas are in some sense inseparable, but it depends on what one concentrates on. A word is not just an expression of something, it is also a performance, a ritual and a relation to others. It is the speaking rather than what is said that is the important thing.

Religion and Philosophy

This is a particular problem for me, because my own entry into philosophy (entirely fortuitous, as anyone's), rather than just knowing about the history of philosophy, is Levinas. I believe it is completely impossible (though some think you can, and maybe even he did at one stage of his work) to separate his philosophical from his religious writings. When I had given this up, I thought about it negatively and naively, and their inseparability meant that he was susceptible to the same Nietzschean critique as Kant, but now I think that I am entirely wrong about that, because it puts the meaning of God in Levinas in completely the wrong place conceptually and historically.