GNNM,
Greetings. Not that I am in favor of dropping an amusing line of reasoning, your post merits reflection as well. And if I am summarizing correctly I believe you said, "Get used to the idea: JWs, like other Christian sects is going to be around for a long time. Look at the record."
At first I was going to say, "Odds are you are right." But I'm not sure that's true either. There is though, a natural selection process at work. Some movements around in the first century have vanished with hardly a trace. Others ,we read about courtesy of their church historian critics - unfavorable reviews. Still others we don't acknowledge because their beliefs have been assimilated into our (?) own. Example? Zoroastrians. And should we have had an opportunity to do some backward time travel to talk with the writers of classical antiquity, BC or AD, would there not be some surprised look on faces - theirs and ours?
What are the examples that you cited but mutations of belief systems prevalent earlier? Mutations out of Judea swept prevailing Mesopotamian belief systems aside. But did they owe nothing to the Mesopotamians?
Biblical study is something that I had off most of my life and was only galvanized into doing so by the outrageous claims I encountered, leading to participation in this forum. Since I found much that is troubling, I neither want to sweep it under the rug or simply be dismissive. There's got to be some other course. 100 or 1000 years ago, that appears to have been a pre-occupation of many people. Should this not be true as well in the future based on our children's children's perspective? (Well, wait a minute - I've got to remember the background of my audience. Maybe consensus will be a resounding NO!!!)
In the meantime, what do I tell younger members of my familiy? Or anyone that looks to me for guidance because I am old and read a book or two once? To me telling them to give up on understanding or following the example of Christ is like sitting high in a tree sawing away at the limb between you and the trunk. There has got to be a better answer.
And that brings me back around to the original topic: shelf life. If Christianity is built on a convergence on an end in the 19th or 20th century, that version has been shown repeatedly, demonstrably false. Scratchiong at a blackboard years ago, contemplating whether humanity will remain a proposition that would last as long as the stars we were discussing - or whether it was already on its way to termination due to conversations on red telephones, my thoughts then were that Chistianity had to have an underlying philosophy
Good whether the end was ten minutes from now or a billion years hence.
I'd like to think: If the end comes in a few minutes and you are standing around in an elevator with people of different faiths, Christian and otherwise, just like on a sinking ship, you should be able to say: "Hang on. It's going to be all right. We are in this together..."