Re: Angel confusion...
Very astute, Acta non Verba. One thing I would like to add to that is that the cherubim and the seraphim are not the only classes of angel; any attempt to classify angels was not brought forth until Medieval times. The quote "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy" is the way I like to take the "angel" thing.
The Abrahamic texts more or less seem to consist of humans recording stuff that YHWH blasts their perceptions with, as He flings them helplessly about in a puppet-show that they have no conception or understanding of. "OK! I SAW AN ANGEL WITH A LION FACE, AND A BUFFALO FACE, AND WINGS AND WHEELS, AND THEN THERE WERE THESE FLYING SNAKE THINGS, AND THEN GOD TOLD ME TO WRITE SOMETHING DOWN, SO I DID, AND THEN..." If the same experiences were to happen to a person today (if they're not 100% fiction), who knows what they would describe. I suspect it would sound like a very different experience if a person were subjected to it in modern times.
Imo, people need to stop listening to other peoples' interpretations of these texts and to start looking into them themselves (or at the very least, investigate the origins of the interpretations they follow). These are ancient texts, and a great deal of random folklore has been tacked onto them that would baffle the original authors (such as the cherubim being fat babies descended from a warped pagan god of love) The image of a Led-Zeppelin-esque man-with-wings angel might start to fade then.
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