Hmmm. Maybe that particular translator got sloppy. Surely, this will become apparent:
27 Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (RSV)
Oh. Another sloppy translation. Moving on . . .
27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (NIV)
Oh, c'mon. Sloppy. Sloppy. But the RSV and NIV are suspect translations, right? How about one that attempts to stick close to the original Greek:
27 Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained [a]by the world. (NASB)
What? Yet more sloppiness? How about we go back further in time, away from any modernist influence. The Geneva Bible. Geneva, home of John Calvin. No fan of the Catholic religion was he.
27 [a]Pure religion and undefiled before God, even the Father, is this, to [b]visit the fatherless, and widows in their adversity, and to keep himself unspotted of the world. (Geneva)Uggh. It's just so hard to believe how all these translators can be so sloppy! Now, surely, SURELY, the inspired translators of the King James Bible, faithful to the Textus Receptus, must have gotten it right.
Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. (KJV)
OK, we are forced to a choice here. Either all these translators with their Greek linguistic knowledge all dropped the ball a bit here. Or someone named "CynicalBear," a person with likely no expertise in Greek, is being a bit foolish.
Yeah, I'll pick the latter.
Newsflash! "Religion" isn't some sort of dirty word. It's OK. You can use it. And so can I. And it's not "pathetic."