Hugh,

If you thought otherwise, you would be a Christian as well, so I am neither surprised nor shocked.

I think the central issue Wittgenstein raised for the philosophy of religion, however, is whether believers do care or should care whether their commitments are based on facts or pious legends. I can understand belief systems to which the truth of historical claims is inessential. The reason why this is not so for Christianity is that the role of Christ is not merely that if a contingent historical founder who could just as well have been someone else or even the collective consciousness of a community. This matters for Christians and not, say, Buddhists or Taoists, because Christianity holds that Jesus Christ effected a real change fundamental to our core beliefs. Traditional Christianity claims that Jesus Christ altered our metaphysical relation to God so as to allow us to participate in the interior, loving and Trinitarian life of God (something the Orthodox call "divinization" and we more prosaic Catholics call "sanctifying grace"). For many Protestants, the change is juridical, not metaphysical, but nonetheless real.

For Catholics and Orthodox, our experience of such participation reflects on the credibility of the historical processes enabling it. If no fundamental change occurred, Christianity is empty. On the other hand, I could subscribe to Buddhism, Taoism or Native American Spirituality knowing that their founding stories were utterly false, because the details of their founding is inessential to the truth of their present commitments. This difference in etiological structure should interest philosophers of religion, because it divides religions that can withstand demythologization, such as Buddhism, Taoism and Native American Spirituality, form those which can't, such as traditional Christianity.

DFP