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Religion in Form OnlyThe Watchtower—1956 | January 15
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so those outwardly righteous religionists were a great source of peril to others. Jesus emphasized this by using another forceful illustration: “Woe to you, because you are as those memorial tombs which are not in evidence, so that men walk upon them and do not know it!” (Luke 11:44, NW) Since the law of Moses considered unclean those who had touched anything belonging to the dead, the Jews took care to have their tombs whitewashed each year, that, being easily discovered, they might be avoided. But the Pharisees—their uncleanness was not apparent, they were hidden graves, unsuspected tombs! The people stumbled on the Pharisees, not knowing they had touched death and were “defiled.”
Outward show but no inner worth: that was the religion of the Pharisees. They were the kind of religious faddists well described by Christ’s apostle as “men corrupted in mind and despoiled of the truth, thinking that godly devotion is a means of gain.” But not only the Pharisees were faddists. The entire Jewish nation was deeply religious; their form of godly devotion was highly impressive but inwardly their religion was hollow. Most of them stumbled on Jesus, rejecting him as the Messiah; not only that, but in the days of the prophets they showed that their godly devotion rested on a substratum of selfishness. So Jesus told the religious faddists: “You hypocrites, Isaiah aptly prophesied about you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, yet their hearts are far removed from me.’”—1 Tim. 6:5; Matt. 15:7, 8, NW.
The case of the religious faddists in Jesus’ day is most significant now. Why? Because Christ’s apostle foretold as a concrete sign of the last days of this present wicked system of things that there would be a boom in religion—pharisaical religion. Do we see it? Do we see multitudes of people who have religion in their confessions, their catechisms, their prayers, their songs, their books, their oaths and their mottoes but are yet destitute of the power of godly devotion? In short, do we see people who have religion in form but not in truth? For the views of prominent clergymen on these questions see the following article.
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Religion Becomes a FadThe Watchtower—1956 | January 15
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Religion Becomes a Fad
THE greatest religious boom in history is now on. The evidence is overwhelming, especially in America. Not only does the American president open his cabinet meetings with silent prayer, not only is there a meditation room for prayer in the Capitol in Washington, not only do religious books appear week after week on best-seller lists, not only have the words
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