JF Ptak Science Books Post 234
I’d like to say that this was a class-of-its-own sort of work, but as it goes this is hardly the case. If I cared a little I guess I could establish a collecting sub-category in the nuclear fission–atomic–nuclear weapon collection for the popular belief that god ordained and transmitted the atomic bomb. There are at least five other pamphlets like this floating around in the store, and I am certain that there must’ve been dozens of other grabby little publications like this proclaiming Almighty Influence in the creation of the atomic bomb. I can understand the reasoning behind the power grab: the bomb ended the war a week after its second use, sparing the lives, perhaps, of a million soldiers (American and Japanese) and years of societal/infrastructure rehabilitation by eliminating the need of an American invasion of the Empire. So the denominator was simply the “saved (American) lives” part.
Again, I can understand how this felt in 1945/6, but I still feel that getting the suspected creator of the universe involved in the making and use of the bomb was ill-advised. The author of the first pamphlet reached back into history and credited god with simple solutions to complex situations: employing the more modern political technique of controlling language in the Tower of Babel case (wher he also said that since Babel was only 105 years after the flood that Noah was still alive, and that certainly Noah “would’ve voted ‘No’” for the building of the tower); and using “Johnny Snowflake” to stop the “non-satanic” Napoleon from reaching “Britain’s doorstep (and obviousy not the Soviet Reds). Bennet also credits god with giving “Dr. Currie” (sic) the genius to “split atoms” in 1896.
The second pamphlet uses the atomic weapon a little more figuratively. The author, Mel Morris, published this in 1945, which means he must’ve worked a little feverishly to pump up his bible prophesy and history to include the new atomic weapon to replace whatever else he had been using as a prophecy for end of times. (As it turns out, “God’s Atomic Bomb” was more tempest and disaster in the bible, and not (whew!) the bomb itself. Though as we’ve learned from scientologists and the sort-of creative mind of Ron Hubbard, a civilization came to the earth thousands of years ago and pummeled it with “atomic bombs” and other nastiness, polluting humans for milennia to come. But that’s another story–suffice to say that Morris found many dozens of examples of “God’s Atomic Bomb” being used in the deep biblical past, and that the use of the real atomic bomb in 1945 was pre-ordained, and not without its figurative historical counterparts. I’m not sure why any of this was necessary outside of proving to some small minority that these preachers could at least be contemporary and topical.
trench (that just happens to be there in the middle of the yard) and cover your head with a sheet “to protect you from heat” (“if your drying laundry is within reach”). I hope that its an Oxford double weave.
“The lunatic , the lover and the poet,
But Mr. Pickett did evidently assemble ALLOT of data and drawings and plans and renderings of the pyramids in the course of looking for the secret strings which would alter the known into the secret and unknown.
Oscar Lowry attempts to answer the question in the subject line of this post in a very red book of 46 shouty pages. What he’s really concerned with, in Where are the Dead (1930), and what he maintains is of “universal interest to the saved and unsaved, the hearers and nonhearers”, is what happens to people after they die; more particularly though, Mr. Lowry is interested in differentiations in eternal damnations versus eternal doom. And there is evidently a very wide difference here, as people in Hades are just in “prison”, waiting for their final judgment which will fling them into Mr. Cash’s ring of fire (well,”lake” of fire, actually). There’s also little chance that the snakey charms of Orpheus’ poetry will ever change anyone’s mind at the gates of Sheol-Hades, leading anyone away from the firey pit. The discussion of Hades and Hell and Sheol is interesting if not scary in Mr. Lowry’s hands, describing “Sheol-Hades” as a “prison”, its occupants waiting for final disposition to Hell. Strong’s Hebrew opens the possibilities of definition with a number of translations for Sheol: the underworld, the abode of the dead, place of no return; without praise of God; wicked sent there for punishment; righteous not abandoned to it; of the place of exile; of extreme degradation in sin. The most troubling of these in my book is the definition of what it is not, as in “when the righteous are not abandoned to it”, which seems both reassuring and really terrifying.. 
Missing them is understandable if you weren’t looking closely at the image’s little bits and pieces, what with the horses occupying something like 1/1,000 of the print’s surface. But there they are, clear and bright as day: “1798, Ascent by Testu-Brissey”, and “1828 London Chas Green on horseback”, and “1850 Paris Poiteven’s ascent on horseback (10,000 spectators)”. 
Now what was going on in this display–appearing in the Illustrated London News on 8 September 1928–was the idea that a group of soldiers (14 in this case) could be seated in a cushioned/springed box which would be parachuted onto a battlefield. The idea of getting troops into a tight or difficult spot by a parachute is a very good one, a brilliant step forward really in the history of military strategy–but doing it in this fashion, by these means, was just not correct. First of all the whole thing looks way too heavy for the aircraft to leave the ground to begin with, at least with those engines; then it looks too heavy for the chute to pull it out of the plane (and looks as though it would act as an airbrake more than anything else, as the chute seems to be gigantic, fully half the width of an already-wide aircraft. I reckon that given space for seven seated men that the cabin would have to be at least 25′ long, meaning that the parachute seems to be 10 cabin-widths in the larger image, or 250′ in diameter…in the smaller image the chute is only 4 times the length of the cabin or so, meaning it is a hundred feet across.). The intention was for the chute to be deployed and for it to somehow lift the big box up and out of the plane, without dragging into or across the tail and etc. Then there’s the issue of landing, which, springs or shock absorbers or not, looks to be very problematical. 
