My wife got a fire pit for her birthday. It is one of those small metal ones you can buy from Home Depot. It is perfect for burning a few logs on a nice fall evening while you sit around it sipping hot coca. We were doing just that one night with two of our close friends.
We were having a great time until a bit of a disagreement started. I had several old cardboard pizza boxes that I was going to use to get the fire started, but my friend did not want me to do that. He told me that cardboard boxes were unsafe to burn. That they release cancerous chemicals in their smoke.
We went back and forth. I said, “Burning them is perfectly fine. I've been doing it for years.” Then he would say, “No it is not, you have been breathing in cancer for years.” Eventually, my wife grew tired of our debate and she just wanted to get the fire started. So, she brought out a pile of magazines. We decided to burn them instead.
Miranda put the magazines under the wood and started a wonderful fire that led to an equally wonderful night. However, the next morning I decided to do a little investigating. I googled the question “Is cardboard safe to burn?” This led me to the website familyhandyman.com and their list of ten things that are unsafe to burn. #7 on the list was cardboard. Not all cardboard, just cardboard that has a plastic coating like that you would find on a pizza box. It seemed my friend was right.
However more interesting than #7 was number #3, “magazines”. Magazines are printed with toxic ink on toxic paper. Burning magazines is one of the most unhealthy things you can do with a firepit. The only thing worst than burning magazines is #1 burning yourself or another person, for obvious reasons, or #2 gasoline, because of the risk of explosions.
In our attempt to prevent toxic chemicals we made more of them. Why didn't I take the five seconds to google that question earlier instead of debating something I didn’t know much about? I think this experience perfectly sums up what we sometimes do. We are willing to discuss something we know nothing about quite passionately instead of taking a few minutes to research it. Then we end up with a more toxic situation than we had when we started.
This extends to the Bible as well. How many people believe that scripture conclusion they have always been told and are willing to defend it passionately, but are not willing to examine the scripture for themselves? I think we would all benefit from doing a little bit more of our own research and not taking those things that we hold passionately for granted.