Wittgenstein and religion

In reading Kenny's chapter on Wittgenstein's "Ethics, Life, and Faith", it seems that Wittgenstein describes religion as a sort of language game, as is anything else we do. The language of religion has to be understood differently than the language used in science, say, because it's part of a different language game. Wittgenstein says, regarding religious narratives:

Here you have a narrative, don't take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it (261).

...historical proof (the historical-proof game) us irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else (261).

What's more, Wittgenstein equates religious belief to a commitment to a system of reference, like all our beliefs. And this belief is more of a "way of living" (263), not necessarily something you believe or don't believe by choice. It's as though you have to grow up in the right environment to believe a certain religion (or not to believe). This seems an accurate description, for most people 'believe' in whatever religion they grew up in. For example, most people from mainly Christian countries are Christian, most people from mainly Muslim countries are Muslim, most people from Buddhist countries are Buddhist, and so on. Even those who profess to have really chosen their beliefs, to have come to see that such-and-such religion was the 'answer' to life, subscribe to the religion that is the religion of their community, their family, or their society. And for those who may have grown up in a certain religion and begin to believe in another (or not to believe), it seems there have to have been certain conditions in the way they grew up that made it acceptable and even desirable to critically question religion.

So religion's just another language game, one whose rules and beliefs are determined by a certain system of reference. What, then, of ethics? Wittgenstein remains rather silent on the topic, saying it's one that can only be talked about in nonsense. He doesn't equate ethics to a language game. Maybe this is because Wittgenstein doesn't want to make ethics relative. Throughout his discussion of language games he's insisted that there's no essence that determines the nature of concepts, it's all in the way they're used. If he were to extend this theory to ethics, one might be able to read him as a moral relativist, as someone who thinks that our considerations of 'right' and 'wrong' depend on the way in which the concepts are used in the particular language game of whatever community we're in.

So though Wittgenstein wants desperately to get rid of the idea that one can get at essences (by saying they don't exist), he seems stuck at ethics, and doesn't know what he can do with it. He says that ethics , "if anything, is supernatural" (253). You can't make ethical propositions. It's hard to explain what it really means to say that something is right or wrong, and ethical issues aren't clear-cut.