"what important point do we learn from the link?"
I make dauntingly long posts and you want me to make more? OK. As it bears
on these posts:
The Evangelicals share the JWs leaders' stance of an inerrant Bible, but it's
not the common stance among Christians otherwise. Most Christians, if not all
progressive/reform as I'd recommend for an Abrahamic faith, understand faith as
such to some degree: a hope in a possible God beyond the known things.
Understanding that isn't even Faith 101--it's more like the introduction to
the course which just goes over definitions of the most common terms to be used
in it.
(A Biblical confirmation--Jesus said to doubting Thomas: "Blessed are they who
did not see, and yet believed." NASB John 20:29 A major NT teaching is salva-
tion by faith.)
For philosophy about a possible basic God concept I recommend "How To Think
About God," Mortimer Adler.
Yet some people get lost in proving God is or isn't in the known things and
have more in common than they realize. It's like neither can interpret the
Bible or understand how to believe in a possible God beyond the known things any
better than a Fundamentalist Literalist/Orthodox Muslim, it's just that the
Literalist/Orthodox believes it and the disbeliever rejects it. But both stink
at the ground rules of how to have faith in perspective related to the known
things. (I'd recommend a progressive/ reform stance, but even conservatives
usually see certain things as allegorical, etc.).
Looking for it all in the known things God is possible beyond misses the
point of what faith is like staring into the west to see the sun come up. (I'm
going to prove where the ark landed and prove is/I'm going to dig fossils from
the hill and prove isn't.)
The JWs leaders train followers to have an unrealistic perspective of proving
or disproving with the known things. They force the choice that you should
agree with the JWs leaders' version, including every distinctive misinterpreta-
tion of theirs, of an inerrant NWT or you don't really believe in God. That's
more like the purview of the Orthodox majority of Islam--profess that the
writing of the Qur'an is the miracle of Islam or you don't honor Allah--than
the stance of many Christians.
I've written before about the problems that stagnated misunderstanding can
lead to (refusing the medical use of blood/major blood products, bigotry about
women and homosexuals, shunning or execution of outspoken apostates, etc.). If
there is a God, it insults Him.
(I made homosexuals the way they are and want you to kill them. What do you
think I made them for--target practice? That's messed up. What's your Inquisi-
tion for? You think I had Jesus tell followers to look for people who are
different and beat them up? Oy, goyim.)
It can also cause some disbelievers to look down on all believers as people
who must misunderstand the known things instead of people with a hope for a
possible God beyond them, which allows the healthy development of it as the
things known grow. To make an analogy with music--the known things/the objec-
tive math of music, faith/subjective reactions to music--it's like warning you
have to not like music or you'll play the wrong notes and off the beat, which
isn't true.
