My friend, Mike Dean, sent me this good quote from Francis Schaeffer, written in the 1970s.
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.
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 new thinkable
without a jolt.
