A religion attempts to relate a human being to the Eternal, to the Highest Things, to God, whatever. If there is anything to be called the Eternal, The Highest

A religion attempts to relate a human being to the Eternal, to the Highest Things, to God, whatever. If there is anything to be called the Eternal, The Highest, God, etc, then true religion will get you right with it. An ethics, or the most important part of one, relates a human being to other human beings. If there are other human beings (there are!), then a true ethics will get you right with them. This definition, which is more or less traditional, is broad enough to allow egoism, Hobbesianism, etc. as forms of ethics - so that it would be intelligible to say that one gets right with others by taking adequate advantage of them. Your suggestion that ethics (or the part of it that relates people to each other) must be some form of religion is in fact a reductive claim about religion. But it also threatens to destroy the specific character of the ethical. It entails, for example, that one person does not wrong another by, say, killing her or lying to him, but only ever wrongs God, or the Eternal or the Most High. Killing someone on your account (supposing Christianity as the background religion) would not be formally different from, say, not going to church on Sunday; they're all just cases of going wrong by God. Every human experience of grievance and anger at someone is a rejection of this nonsensical idea. The content of these passions is "He done me wrong", not "He done God wrong". The distinction was always been maintained in classical theology. The reduction of ethics to religion is a specifically American phenomenon, though it has precursors and echoes elsewhere.