Psalm 137 King James Version
137 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4 How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
6 If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
7 Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Psalm 139 King James Version
139 O lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.
2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.
3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.
4 For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
5 Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.
7 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
10 Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
11 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.
12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.
14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
15 My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
17 How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!
18 If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.
19 Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.
20 For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain.
21 Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?
22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:
24 And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
If they were part of the Old Testament, they remain valid for us to sing and feel today.
Also, we must pray them.
Without validity.
Patriactionary 
feeriker
April 21, 2024 at 3:26 pm
Moderns don’t like the imprecatory psalms, and always try to explain them away.
Without validity.
Moderns don’t much like Scripture, period. They tolerate Christianity because they still don’t have the guts to apostasize fully and publicly, so they compensate by trying to “modernize” the concept of God and His word. In other words, they attempt to change an unchangeable God.
Will S.
April 21, 2024 at 4:07 pm
Indeed.
electricangel
April 21, 2024 at 5:40 pm
I wrote a longer comment earlier that got eaten. Rats.
was talking with a Shiite friend from Persia last week. Recent thought had seized my mind. The gist of the argument: Jesus represents an introduction of an idea of God closer to Ahura Mazda of Zoroastrianism than Yahweh. The Persians were an Indo-European people; Iran is a corruption of the group they consider themselves descended from, the Aryans. Judaism had never caught on amongst Indo-Europeans, being a Semitic religion from outside the family. There were few Proselytes.
Jesus’s new faith, by contrast, drew many Jews to it. It was also widely popular with the Greeks, the Romans, and eventually the Germans; I suspect because it was grounded in Indo-European ethics, not Semitic ones. The thought one commenter had was that Pharisaical Judaism HATED this “theft” of Jews and has blamed Iran/Persia ever since, and this is the underlying cause of the hatred of Iran today. Talmudic commentary reserves its greatest hate not for Muslims but for Jesus, said to be boiling in excrement in hell forever.
we have to remember what an improvement Judaism was over other Semitic faiths, like Moloch/Baal worship. Instead of roasting alive their first-born children, parents could now instead simply mutilate th male children and this would be sufficient sacrifice to God as the Hebrews understood him.
Christendom was formed from Greek logic, Roman Organization, Indo-European ethics transformed into the Christian religion, and German martial spirit. It critically depends on those four elements. The Lambeth conference of 1930 permitting anti-child contraception was the first step to rolling back this ancient religious practice begun with the Jews: God smiles on faiths who welcome children and not on those who avoid and especially abort them.
Will S.
April 21, 2024 at 5:49 pm
Interesting.
electricangel
April 21, 2024 at 5:43 pm
been talking with a Shiite friend from Persia. Discussing the idea that Jesus introduces ideas more coherent with Zoroastrianism to a Semitic religion. The suggestion was explicitly this: Zoroastrianism is a religion of an Indo-European people, the people of Iran, a corrupted form of Aryan. Jesus’ new religion is thus much more aligned with Indo-European peoples and its more attractive to Jews who are tired of the Sanhedrin and Pharisaical Judaism. Judaism never gained large numbers of converts amongst the Indo-European peoples because its ethics are so foreign to that group’s understanding of God (see what the Aryans brought to India that became Hinduism.)
We discussed the idea that this is where the enmity between Israel and Iran comes from. The Talmudic Jews never forgave the man Jesus for leading so many Jews away from their version of faith in God, and they blame Zoroastrians for it. The Zoroastrians had a choice after their sacred fires went out: become Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. They went Muslim, and much of the emphasis on cleanliness that is in Islam originates with them.
We have to remember what an improvement Judaism was over other Semitic religions, like Baal/Moloch worship. There they LITERALLY sacrificed their first-born child to satisfy the demon they thought was God; Jews replaced this death of the whole child with a mutilation of the male children to satisfy him.
it’s still a Semitic religion ill-suited to the Europeans who later built Christendom by combining Judaic Monotheism with Indo-European ethics, Greek philosophy, and German martial spirit.
Will S.
April 21, 2024 at 5:50 pm
I recall Sam Francis had basically defined Western civilization as what flowered from the intersection of Athens, Jerusalem, Roman, and the Germanics, in essence.
Thomas Henderson
April 22, 2024 at 8:18 am
You make several brilliant points that got me thinking. electicangel, you’re on to something.
Thank you.
Old patterns tend to get replayed over and over again. For example, British electoral politics tend to run along the historic fault-lines of the English civil war which runs along the fault-lines of the English reformation which runs along the fault-lines of the English War of the Roses which runs along the fault-lines of the Norman conquest. Similarly the Orthodox/Catholic divide roughly corresponds with the Hellenistic/Latin speaking divide of the Mediterranean world and Protestantism took hold most vehemently north of the Rhine at the Roman / Germania border. There are nuances but the patterns are still discernible.
To repeat a line I first heard from Gerry Bowler, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
The Arabs trace their descent from Abraham through Ismael while any proper thinking Persian will see himself as an heir of Cyrus the Great. Similarly the Shiite / Sunni divide among Mohammedanism reflects ethnic divisions. Shiites are more hierarchical and authority oriented: Sunnis, tribal and egalitarian. Russians (Orthodoxy) therefore have a natural affinity with Iranians (Shiites/Zoroastrians), while Puritan oriented WASPish Americans would look favourably on Saudis (Wahhabism) and Jews.
If one wants to figure out the nature of US foreign policy these days one just has to look at the family trees of members of Congress and denizens of the State department.
electricangel
April 22, 2024 at 9:05 am
They’re mostly not my points, Thomas, though I’m glad you found them worthwhile.
One of the better divisions of Christianity I’ve ever read is Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine, for Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Orthodoxy, each being largely inspired by Paul, Peter, or the apostle John, respectively. I’m descended from people on the fault line of the Lines, the ancient Roman borderlands. As Hilaire Belloc pointed out, the only former province of the Roman Empire to go Protestant was England though Switzerland is Protestant enough to go with that.
So, yes, history is ever present and living with us. We repeat the patterns of people we are copying who copied the people they saw growing up and in this way the words and ways of people long dead live on. Patriactionaries know that many of these patterns are fences put up long ago that ought not be taken down until we understand why they are there in the first place.
The sad news is there’s little reason for religious wars in Christendom: religion doesn’t matter to that crowd, soon to be replaced by people who do worship God in some form, if not the more perfect forms our ancestors did.
there’s another aspect to Shiite/Sunni split. Shiites believe in free will, while Sunnis do not. Perhaps an oversimplification but it strikes at the major difference between Catholic and Reformed: predestination. Will and I would love the opportunity to go to war against each other over the issue, but right now there are FAR too many people who don’t know what we both do: that Jesus died to free us from sin, to pay our bill and clear the decks. When the world knows that fact we can get back to religious wars; him being Canadian, I expect an easy victory, but God May will otherwise. As the Arabs say, inshallah.
There another idea my friend and I discussed: the Teutonic collapse. After the Germanic tribes ended that parasitic, evil empire, ALL the countries of Western Europe were founded by Germans: Visigoths in Spain and Portugal, Franks in France, Anglo-Saxons in the UK, Germans in German, north Germans in Scandinavia, Lombards and Ostrogoths in Italy. Visigothic law is very similar to Anglo-Saxon, for instance.
this decentralized political structure helped create Christendom. In 1914, this Teutonic order put a gun to its head and blew its brains out, followed by the insane crimes of the Germans who kept speaking German in Germany later in the century. Now Western Civ is adrift, waiting for the next group to overlay its ethics upon it and rebuild it. It might be Slavic, with Russia restoring Christianity and extending it throughout Asia. It might be Arab, with Islamic intrusion on Europe from Southeast and Southwest and no Charles Martel in sight, and with treasonous elites importing the warriors who will replace what was a Teutonic club.
What it will not be is atheist. That way lies ennui and malaise.
Thomas Henderson
April 22, 2024 at 9:56 am
…. <i>him being Canadian, I expect an easy victory</i> ….
lol… our nice guy stereotype does have some currency, although Canada’s own Celtic fringe (quite sizable in days of yore) was fiercely warlike. Canadians as peacekeepers is a Liberal Party propaganda trope.
Good points about the Germanic peoples and their take over in the collapse of the Roman empire. Lessons hinting at our own immanent peril as we allow migrants to swarm our borders.
There is something to the insight on the link between the Shiite/Sunni and Catholic/Protestant emphasis on free will and predestination.
Finally Anglicanism (to your point about Britannia being the only province of the Roman Empire to turn Protestant) is a funny creature. The Tudors and the Stuarts (Welsh and Scottish bloodlines respectively) saw the English reformation as a restoration of sacred monarchy (a return of England to its pre-Roman antecedents) while the Puritans/ Glorious Revolutionaries / the Hanoverians emphasized its tribal/egalitarian/Judaising zeal (in other words Anglo-Saxon Germanic Protestantism). The old Celtic and Anglo-Saxon battle for the soul of Britain (the red dragon vs. the white dragon) continues to play itself out.
all very interesting
also very telling that most patriactionaries have a profound appreciation for history.
Steiner
April 21, 2024 at 8:50 pm
Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves:
Isiah 28:15
Will S.
April 21, 2024 at 9:01 pm
Indeed.
Thomas Henderson
April 22, 2024 at 8:44 am
<i>Moderns don’t like the imprecatory psalms, and always try to explain them away.
Without validity. </i>
Will S, that line is a keeper. I may quote (recite) it in the future 🙂
Will S.
April 22, 2024 at 10:50 am
Thanks Thomas! 🙂