slimboyfat

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Posts by slimboyfat

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  87

  What does the Catholic church think of JW?

  by Halcon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.

  he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.

  is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?

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  slimboyfat

  The original article said she was a “cousin” of the pope, it didn’t say “first cousin”, to be accurate. For many people the additional clarity in the the second interview in 2008 that she was a “second cousin”, specifying that her mother was the pope’s cousin, along with dates, locations, key childhood experiences, and mention of another living relative in Australia, might tend to corroborate - but you think it does the opposite?

  As I already said, maybe we can’t prove it’s true (although your arguments against are looking increasingly desperate) but it’s certainly likely enough to be true to be relevant to the conversation, which is all I claimed. And the original statement you put out from ChatGPT and claimed to have verified is clearly false when you said: “There is no widely available documentation or media coverage to verify this story.” You’ve gone from arguing there was none, to arguing there was only one, to arguing you don’t believe any of the sources anyway - quite a distance, and somewhat “tedious”, to use your own word.
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  31

  Curious? How many members of this group feel we are living in the "End Times"?

  by Balaamsass2 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i like to take a peek at the kids over on reddit every week or so.. this thread caught my eye:" curious….

  do any ex jw or pimo, still believe the world is ending.

  i see people who have never been witnesses think that the world will end soon and they say things like “jesus is coming soon”….

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  slimboyfat

  Most prophets and end-times predictors point to dates within their own lifetime. Isaac Newton apparently bucked that trend and predicted the end for 2060.

  https://isaac-newton.org/statement-on-the-date-2060/
  
• 
  87

  What does the Catholic church think of JW?

  by Halcon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.

  he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.

  is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  slimboyfat

  The Austrian report adds a detail about another relative in Australia (google translation from the original German):

  Pope's cousin is a Jehovah's Witness: Ratzinger's relative lives in Australia

  Brzakovic's mother was a cousin of Ratzinger's mother, Maria Peintner. The family lived in Weilheim in Upper Bavaria, 50 kilometers from the village where the Ratzinger family lived. "We often played together. Joseph was always where he shouldn't have been. When I think back today, it's a miracle we're still alive. Once, when we were playing together, Joseph fell into a pond and almost drowned," the woman said. The Pope also recounted this incident in his biography published in 1997.
  

  Steffie Brzakovic emigrated to Australia in 1956, when Joseph Ratzinger was still a young priest. There was no further contact between the two for 50 years. In April 2005, shortly after his election as pope, Brzakovic received a call from Benedict XVI. "At first, I thought it was a joke. But then he told me he was 'Ratzinger-Pepi.' We always called him by that nickname as children," the woman reported. Brzakovic reported that she would have liked to meet the Pope in Sydney. "Unfortunately, I can't leave my apartment; I'm too old," said the woman, who, however, is still hoping for a call from Joseph Ratzinger. A direct cousin of the Pope, 83-year-old Erika Kopp, also lives in Australia.
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  31

  Curious? How many members of this group feel we are living in the "End Times"?

  by Balaamsass2 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  i like to take a peek at the kids over on reddit every week or so.. this thread caught my eye:" curious….

  do any ex jw or pimo, still believe the world is ending.

  i see people who have never been witnesses think that the world will end soon and they say things like “jesus is coming soon”….

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  slimboyfat

  To adapt the well known observation: “just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me”:

  Just because people have always believed it’s the end times doesn’t mean it isn’t the end times!

  In fact I think it’s probably overdetermined in the sense that there are multiple threats that could end humanity in the 21st century and it’s just a matter of what gets us first: nuclear war, ecological disaster in the form of species extinction (insects in particular) and habitat collapse, climate change, artificial intelligence, deadly pandemics. Personally I think artificial intelligence is the greatest and most imminent threat, though nuclear war could take us any time, and if neither of those two materialise then ecological disaster or a deadly pandemic will catch up with us sooner or later.

  All of which has got people thinking more about simulations, aliens, and even God. If there is a God will he step in before humans finish themselves off entirely? Are we at this interesting point in history for a reason? Whatever that might mean. I think they are reasonable questions to ponder.
• 
  87

  What does the Catholic church think of JW?

  by Halcon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.

  he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.

  is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  slimboyfat

  Thanks Earnest, it was reported in Austria too

  https://www.krone.at/107803

  https://www.news.at/news/cousine-papst-zeugin-jehova

  Apparently she died in 2013

  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/195999273/stefanie-brzakovic
  
  
• 
  87

  What does the Catholic church think of JW?

  by Halcon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.

  he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.

  is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  slimboyfat

  Did the priest know your JW connection or did he just tell the story in general?

  I came across this old Awake! article from 1987 …

  Why Are So Many Becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses?

  IN MANY lands people are doing just that. For example, at Bologna, Italy, church authorities, with the pope’s approval, held a congress to study how to combat the success of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Catholic Church raised a “cry of alarm,” according to La Repubblica, because every year ten thousand Catholics become Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  The Jesuit Giusseppe De Rosa said that “from a religious point of view the most dangerous are Jehovah’s Witnesses. They come fully trained; they always have the Bible in their hand.”

  In an editorial dealing specifically with Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jesuit magazine La Civiltá Cattolica of February 18, 1984, wrote:

  “The first reason for the spread of the movement lies in the propaganda techniques [that is, in the preaching work]. The work on the one hand is painstaking, carried out from door to door by people who are scrupulously trained in this work and strongly convinced.

  “The second reason for the success of the JWs is in the attractive force of the jehovist message, in being able to cater to the needs, demands, and expectations of the people of our times. …
  

  https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/101987202#h=5
  
• 
  87

  What does the Catholic church think of JW?

  by Halcon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.

  he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.

  is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  slimboyfat

  It’s certainly true that JWs imagine other people think about them a lot more than they do, and this phenomenon is probably true of humans in general. On these lines I enjoy and try to remember the quote I heard one time: you’ll stop worrying so much what other people think about you when you realise how seldom they think about you.

  It’s a great story above from the Catholic priest and underlines the fact that JWs talk a lot more about the Catholic Church than the reverse. This was particularly true in the 1960s when the literature was full of caricatures and attacks on the Catholic Church, the thick red book Babylon the Great Has Fallen! presumably written by Fred Franz being a prime example. At the same time the priest had apparently thought enough about JWs in order to make the judgment that they weren’t worth engaging and to come up with a witty response on the spot. If this happened in the 1960s it’s perhaps worth remembering there were ten times fewer JWs back then and that the Catholic Church has since shrunk in the west. Nevertheless a busy priest indeed probably still has little time or inclination to think about or engage JWs.

  JWs are both small enough and numerous enough that it’s not surprising to meet strangers who are either familiar with JWs or who don’t know anything about them, although I don’t remember anyone saying they had never heard of JWs at all, which is commonly the case if I mention the Christadelphians, for example.
• 
  87

  What does the Catholic church think of JW?

  by Halcon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.

  he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.

  is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  slimboyfat

  Well it wasn't me, because I can't like or dislike comments.

  I shared the information about the relative size of JWs in Italy and Ratzinger's JW cousin because I thought it was interesting and relevant to the topic.

  You decided to fact check me for errors, but outsourced it to ChatGPT, which came up with a series of misleading responses, the only one you spotted being the Waldensians. I did learn from the response that the Romanian Orthodox Church is now larger than JWs in Italy because of recent immigration. It was the only actual addition to the information I provided but it's appreciated anyway.

  We can't be certain the photo in the newspaper was real or that the Bavarian woman was telling the truth about being related to the pope, but it seems likely enough to be relevant in a conversation about whether the Catholic church thinks much about JWs, which was supposed to be the topic. Even if this particular woman isn't in fact the pope's cousin, and I don't see any particular reason not to believe her, JWs are numerous enough that popes past and future possibly have a number of relatives and acquaintances who are JWs, this one just made a headline.

  What's a little less likely (it seems to me) are all the details about the pope calling up his cousin after decades and making compliments about JWs. Then again, I remember reading that one of the first things Ratzinger did as pope was contact his old friend turned opponent Hans Küng to invite him for lunch. So maybe even the details of the story are in character for the man. This is a side point, before you point out that it can't be proved, which of course is obvious.
• 
  87

  What does the Catholic church think of JW?

  by Halcon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.

  he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.

  is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  slimboyfat

  The quality of the sites is not the point because they preserve the original source. Unless you think the sites actually faked the news page clipping? Or do you think anything posted on a JW site loses credibility just by its presence. How does that work? If I post the Oxford English Dictionary here does that make the dictionary unreliable too?

  The lady might have made it up but if you think that's more likely than the pope simply having a JW cousin (an entirely everyday and somewhat mundane circumstance) I think you have poor judgment.

  Again all of which is beside the point considering you/ChatGPT originally claimed there was no media report. These later arguments don't change that being false.
• 
  87

  What does the Catholic church think of JW?

  by Halcon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  on a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.

  he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.

  is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  slimboyfat

  There was media coverage and it is readily available and linked above.

  Maybe ChatGPT struggled to access the file because of its format, what's your excuse?