AT LAST GIVING THE DEVIL A NAME

As the proverb would have it, the devil is in the details. And yet, most people never give these details a name. Here's one that works every time -- people!

Think of it this way. How many mechanical inventions, architectural wonders, bank bailouts and football plays have worked perfectly on the drawing board. Only to flop terribly once they were turned over to people? If you start counting, the numbers are staggering. Two examples will do: Christianity and Democracy.

Like most religious founders, Jesus today would very likely not join his own church. Surely not because of the ideas he left it, but because of what his followers have done with some of those ideas. Like Gandhi observed: "Christianity might be worth joining if anyone were really practicing it." Instead, Gandhi found what Jesus might. A claptrap collection of hundreds of denominations each more Pharisaical than the next. And lets remember, it was the Pharisee's obsession with rules the Messiah wailed against.

Consider now the bird-witted array of man-made rules that never dropped from the master's mouth. Two currently ripping some denominations apart are homosexuality and celibacy. The first draws from isolated passages in Ezekiel, Leviticus and Corinthians. But never from Jesus of Nazareth. Likewise celibacy which, though praised by Paul, was only made a rule in the 11th century. Then largely because of the expenses from the clergy's offspring. Another popular man-made rule was meatless Fridays, which comedian George Carlin famously asked after it was dropped: "I wonder how many folks are in still hell on a meat rap!"

I write this as a serious Catholic, but one who hears the current call from some frustrated laity: "Keep the faith, change the church." If for example we were to do so, then President Obama will speak at Notre Dame this month without any embarrassing incidents from rule-bound protesters.

Democracy is another sterling idea whose shine has been muddied by the people practicing it. Among its enduring principles drawn from John Locke through Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln is the "will of the people." In making this social contract with the people, the government obligates itself to rule for the good of the general welfare. In turn, the people obligate themselves to be informed and responsible citizens. It's the very reason for America's free public education for everyone.

I write this as a serious member of this educational system, but who has watched the cause of good citizenship slip and slide in the hands of the very people the system has tried to educate. After graduation, how many close their books and minds foreverafter? Listening instead to mostly the loudest voices what we envisioned a marketplace of ideas. Talk-radio hosts, cable shouters, angry bloggers, bar-stool buddies, whispered prejudices at the water cooler, and those whose understanding of democracy is not so much speech that educates, as it is speech that sells.

Christianity and Democracy -- it doesn't get much better than that. Until, that is, we the people get hold of the details.