Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

Dutch Doctors Want More Authority to Now Kill Healthy Patients Who Want to Die

This deserves a word from the late Francis Shaefer:

There is a "thinkable" and an "unthinkable" in every era. One era is quite certain intellectually and emotionally about what is acceptable. Yet another era decides that these "certainties" are unacceptable and puts another set of values into practice. On a humanistic base, people drift along from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes the thinkable as the years move on. Schaeffer, writing in the 1970s, perceptively continued, The thinkables of the eighties and nineties will certainly include, things which most people today find unthinkable and immoral, even unimaginable and too extreme to suggest. Yet - since they do not have some overriding principle that takes them beyond relativistic thinking - when these become thinkable and acceptable in the eighties and nineties, most people will not even remember that they were unthinkable in the seventies. They will slide into each flew thinkable without a jolt.

James White and Jeffrey Niell comment:

Schaeffer was not arguing that something is worthy of emulation simply because it was previously done. By itself, Dad and Mom's conduct, while often qualitatively better and more polite than that of their children observed at the local mall, is not an adequate standard for morality. In fact, the point is that the basis of yesterday's morality was of such poor quality that it could not prevent its "unthinkables" from becoming "thinkables" in short order. One of yesterday's unthinkables - the social and moral acceptance of homosexuality in both orientation and act, in both desire and deed - is presented to us today as quite thinkable, and though we are speaking of morality and not the changing tide of fashion, our modern society can seldom tell the difference.