JF Ptak Science Books Post 1854
Rev. Franklin Hall was a busy man: with detritus haloes of failing humanity floating above everyone (making them susceptible to the eternal lake of fire), he was on a concerted mission to save as many people as who would listen to his special message. Hall's litany was equal parts simple and complex, as we can see even by just the title of one of his pamphlets: Because of Your Unbelief , Chains of Bondage, Food Slaves, Belly Worshippers, Fleshly Lusts, Unbelief, Doubts & Fears, Carnality (which I wrote about here), which was a short work of considerable claims with no basis of correctness or proof.
He moved on, assuredly inspired by the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945, to write Atomic Power with God thru Fasting and Prayer (received by the Copyright Office in September 1946). As much as this might sound like an adult beverage of your choice, it is not; he set his course not on atomic power per se, but on the connection of fasting and prayer, because, as he writes on page 37, "the Bible is Ahead of Science". (There haven't been very many books at all written with the words "God" and "atomic" in their titles1--and this is one of those few. And the Hall book is actually four of them, as this very small work went through a number of revisions and four editions.)
Which I guess is all fine and good, to a point, so long as the health debits do not pile up too high; the rest is a subject of faith, and about there there is not much that can be said that would be of any use. In the long run it was rather tempestuous of Mr. Hall to assume that using the words "atomic" and "power" in the title of his re-polished gem-let was good to win him a few new readers, surfing on the tide of everything else in the world that was just at that time adding the prefix "atomic" to whatever product there was to be sold2. And God evidently was right there among them.
Notes:
1. Some of the few other examples of having these words in the titles of books (printed 1945-1970) are: This atomic age and the word of God. Smith, Wilbur M. 1894-1976; God and the atomic bomb. LeBlanc, William; A hand book on how preaching is done with more than dynamic or atomic power and a God-given tonic to make the God-sent preacher and the God-sent missionary grow, Hicks, William, 1869-1954; Man, God and atomic war. Dresner, Samuel H.; God's atomic weapon: the blood of Jesus. Prince, Derek, 1971.
2. After the bomb, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all manner of products and places were given a prefix of "Atomic", the word applied to just about anything to afix and imply a concept of hyper modernity and scientia. And so there was atomic soap, powders, rings, toys, detergent, toys, bikes, radios, wagons, hotels, supermarkets, and so on.
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