How do things come to a point?

Regular readers will know that I have picked-up the phrase of Things Coming To A Point from CS Lewis in That Hideous Strength - it refers to the way that good and evil separate and clarify over time, until they reach the 'point' where we are faced by a very clear choice.

But that choice is the end product of what may be a prolonged and gradual process.

The statistician and Roman Catholic blogger William Briggs has encapsulated the whole business of things coming to a point in a pithy paragraph on his (invariably depressing, even when darkly-amusing) weekly roundup of contemporary insanity, culled from The News. Here it is:

If you say there is nothing wrong with, say, sodomy, then it follows that there is nothing wrong with sodomy. And if there is nothing wrong with sodomy, there is nothing wrong with teaching it to kids. One follows from the other.

That's the whole business of things coming to a point, in a nutshell. That's exactly where we are now, i.e. teaching sodomy to kids, young kids; and that's how we got here. And this situation is the challenge of our time.

On the one hand: Moral issues have never been simpler, never been easier - to those capable of basic moral discernment.

On the other hand: What we are seeing is how few modern Western people are capable of basic moral discernment.