“…for a long period we acted as if our democracy were something that perpetuated itself automatically; as if our ancestors had succeeded in setting up a machine that solved the problem of perpetual motion in politics. We acted as if democracy were something that took place…when men and women went to the polls once a year…

“Of late years we have heard more and more frequently that this is not enough; that democracy is a way of life…that democracy is a personal way of individual life; that it signifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life. Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions, we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes.

“Democracy as a personal, an individual, way of life involves nothing fundamentally new. But when applied, it puts a new practical meaning in old ideas. Put into effect, it signifies that powerful, present enemies of democracy can be successfully met only by the creation of personal attitudes in individual human beings; that we must get over our tendency to think that its defense can be found in any external means whatever, whether military or civil, if they are separated from individual attitudes so deep-seated as to constitute personal character.

“Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature…”

- John Dewey
Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us (1939).

It seems to me that a working and deep-seated faith in the possibilities of human nature would preclude a working and deep-seated faith in the divine intervention of a god.

And you wonder why “democracy” isn’t the silver bullet for the Middle East?