American Cherub: Bank of Bondage

[Abishai100]

A cherub is an attendee of God (in Christian mythology) and represents quiet counsel and comfort among other things.

The Valentine's Day avatar Cupid is depicted as a cherub and is not unlike the god of love Eros (from Ancient World mythology).

This holiday season, it may be nice to consider how God's Christian grace may be manifest through the guiding and beneficial hand of a 'peaceful cherub.'

Maybe we need to look at a new interpretation of the purgatory-experimental Book of Job.

If we've 'assigned' a cherub to Valentine's Day festivities, maybe we can 'assign' a cherub to a comforting discussion about the American Dream.


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GOD: Maybe a cherub should be appointed as guide for Black Friday.
SATAN: The shopping-day after Thanksgiving, yes!
GOD: Of course, Icarus was sort of a cherub whose wax wings were melted by the sun.
SATAN: And by his vanity.
GOD: Ambition and capitalism are wed to each other, so a cherub may remind Americans of humility!
SATAN: The American Dream is to make money --- and lots of it.
GOD: There should be a bank with a cherub mascot/logo on it.
SATAN: There is that Minotaur-like bull for Wall Street.

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[ding]

A cherub is an attendee of God (in Christian mythology) and represents quiet counsel and comfort among other things.

The Valentine's Day avatar Cupid is depicted as a cherub and is not unlike the god of love Eros (from Ancient World mythology).

This holiday season, it may be nice to consider how God's Christian grace may be manifest through the guiding and beneficial hand of a 'peaceful cherub.'

Maybe we need to look at a new interpretation of the purgatory-experimental Book of Job.

If we've 'assigned' a cherub to Valentine's Day festivities, maybe we can 'assign' a cherub to a comforting discussion about the American Dream.


====

GOD: Maybe a cherub should be appointed as guide for Black Friday.
SATAN: The shopping-day after Thanksgiving, yes!
GOD: Of course, Icarus was sort of a cherub whose wax wings were melted by the sun.
SATAN: And by his vanity.
GOD: Ambition and capitalism are wed to each other, so a cherub may remind Americans of humility!
SATAN: The American Dream is to make money --- and lots of it.
GOD: There should be a bank with a cherub mascot/logo on it.
SATAN: There is that Minotaur-like bull for Wall Street.

====


View attachment 100471

"...boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism's rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The interrelationship is such, moreover, that the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.

The communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism's crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes. The problem persists: In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.

It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.

If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.

It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.

Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward." Solzhenitsyn