Dear Friends,
I'm not trying to bring discussion of this topic to an end, especially since I started it, but I did want to take a moment and thank everyone who has commented. One thing that I tried to bring out in my article in "Liberty" was my impression of the online Witness discussion community as a lively, complex, and vital "society," with generous enthusiasms and intellectual interests. Whether I succeeded in bringing that out or not, you can judge; but your own response to me has provided new evidence for my impression.
I've often noticed that almost any question that comes up in a community like this gets itself answered--there is always at least one person who knows what the answer is. (Ralph Ellison published an essay on this aspect of real communities called "The Little Man at Chehaw Station"; it's in his collection called "Going to the Territory.) There seems to be one unanswered question at the moment, though--the relationship between "Liberty" magazine, where my article appears, and other "Liberty" magazines, including the 7th Day Adventist one. There isn't any relationship. The "Liberty" where I published is a libertarian intellectual journal that has been in existence only about 15 years. It's libertarian in the sense that it favors minimal government and absolute individual rights, but beyond that it has no "party line," and it's open to a variety of cultural interests. My own research interest in the Witnesses and other non-"mainstream" religions comes partly from my libertarian interest in indivdualism, it's noteworthy that these religions are often shaped by extreme individualists, in the psychological sense, but become extremely authoritarian. Yet because American culture is inherently individualist, it can be very hard to maintain even a "voluntary" authoritarianism. The internet, in particular, is an example of how people can form communities and work together WITHOUT forfeiting their individuality. It's what Friedrich Hayek called a "spontaneous order."
Anyway, folks, thank you!
Stephen