This being the anniverary and all, I remembered this comment by the WTS about the Appollo programme. Seems that it was all evidence of PAGAN worship
The ludicrousness of this paragraph stuck me when we studied it , as a young man - but being a good dub I just shrugged and read the paragraph as directed.
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36" No, the religionists of Christendom today do not actually worship the sun, for they know from their scientists something of what the sun is, so as to know that it is no god. Even after World War II ended in 1945 the emperor of non-Christian Japan was intelligent enough to renounce the claim made for emperors of Nippon that they were descendants of the sun-goddess, Amaterasu. Be that as it may, yet there is a prominent group in Christendom, including the Modernist clergyman of her churches, that has turned from worshiping the God of the Holy Bible, Jehovah, to a substitute of their own choice. They even deny his existence. In place of looking to Him as the source of enlightenment and energy and of the warmth of material comforts, they look to modern science and human philosophy. They pay more respect to these modern scientists and intellectuals, they attribute more to these, than they do to Jehovah. These have become the symbolic “sun” that Christendom worships and to which she looks for salvation. Christendom’s general acceptance of the unprovable Theory of Evolution is one of the evidences betraying her as a worshiper of such a “sun.”
37 Modern science has come to be treated like a “sacred cow,” that must be treated with reverence and that must be considered ahead of the Bible and its God. Modern intellectuality with all its theories has been treated as the up-to-date form of enlightenment that has made the Bible out-of-date, obsolete. This high-speed, nuclear, space age has come to be rated as having advanced beyond the so-called “camel train” philosophy of the Bible. To modern technology is given the credit for all the material comforts and labor-saving devices and communication systems that are at our disposal today. All this has focused the attention upon the human creature. For all these marvelous accomplishments of modern times Christendom’s worship has been directed to the creature. She has turned her back on the Creator, who endowed the human creature with the mental and physical powers to accomplish these things. This constant human tendency to do so was mentioned nineteen centuries ago in Romans, chapter 1, verse 23.
38 Christendom’s infection with the worship of false gods, the gods of demonism, betrays itself very slyly. For instance, on July 20, 1969, when for the first time a human astronaut set foot upon the moon, who was glorified thereby, according to the way that the scientific group responsible for it named things that were involved? Certainly not Jehovah, the Creator of the moon, but the mythological sun-god. How so? Because the man-made spacecraft with which the successful moon-shot for putting Americans on our lunar satellite was made was named Apollo, Number Eleven. Phoebus Apollo was the sun-god of the ancient Greeks and was also the twin brother of Artemis (or Diana), the moon-goddess. This Apollo of the Greeks has been traced back as being the first king of Babylon, namely, Nimrod, the “mighty hunter in opposition to Jehovah.” (Genesis 10:8-10) Since that first landing on the moon, further moon-shots have been made in spacecrafts of the “Apollo” series. All a part of sun worship! "
Know Jehovah - How? p 157 [dated 1971]
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Of course it was also seen as a "Sign of the Times " but then, most things were
