SPIRITUAL CARCINOGENS
When the Challenger went down nearly 20 years ago, the whole country went around draped in a dark cloud of mourning. Soon the shock gave way to outrage and scandal when it was discovered that cost-cutting and
carelessness components that didn’t quite meet the required standard had been passed through quality control. The design specifies that components must be engineered to within a particular degree of tolerance. And the inspectors tolerated imperfections outside the specifications, and people died.
When lives depend on it, inspections matter. When lives depend on parts being tooled to a precision measured in millimeters, tolerating imperfections has serious consequences. Pesticides and carcinogens are measured in amounts almost too small to grasp;even a single accidental death can cause outrage and inquiry. But far too many people who wouldn’t dream of tolerating the slightest degree of "unorthodoxy" in matters which affect our physical lives think nothing at all of ingesting any number of spiritual carcinogens.