Here’s the study.(via reddit) It states that using the statistics available from three very different pools of Muslims, Ramadan fasting can be shown to have clear negative effects on the health of a child at the statistical level. This is, as one can imagine, an inherently incendiary proposition. It ties together a nuanced scientific point with an easily-manipulated set of political implications and eyeball fodder, and we all know where those tend to end up. But it’s worth digging in to the details in order to be prepared should this hit the headlines of the punditry circus. Some background: while pregnant women apparently have flexibility in determining how they will handle Ramadan, some apparently choose to practice different forms of fasting. I have no idea how this is handled in more traditional societies. As far as the study goes, page ii/section A.1.1. addresses the problem of the scarcity of data available and the effect of using a “repay fasting after child delivery” structure, namely that people don’t like fasting on their own and they don’t like being left out of community rituals.
Second, because it will come up near instantaneously, these are economists surveying medical data, and that’s why it comes from that source which oversees the Michigan-area Muslim minority.
The conclusions (p29) suggest that the most serious impacts of fasting on a pregnancy happens during the first month, which is also when a woman is least likely to be aware of her pregnancy. They also draw a connection to how an estimated 40% of US women of childbearing age are attempting to lose weight. In general, the results might be best described (for the US) as providing a concentrated example that should suggest that it’s in everyone’s interest to screen frequently for pregnancy before and during any sort of dietary reduction program at intervals smaller than 1 month. In a way, it’s one of those public health issues that is subtle enough that while Ramadan provides an easy indicator for study, the effect of the information derived is of universal utility assuming it is handled with a certain sensitivity to the source of the data. At the very least, it merits further study from medically trained analysts in order to decide what the cost-benefit really looks like and what, if anything, should be done.
Nevertheless, the off-the-cuff description of this study seems so perfectly designed to generate hysteria that I thought it would be useful to toss out some ideas on it before it it ends up summarized into madness.
I don’t imagine that even substantiated medical evidence/conclusions would be embraced warmly by most of the individuals involved in this fasting practice, even here in America… and therein lies a problem much larger than the “does Ramadan fasting damage a fetus?” question.
I see a women’s health problem where Ramadan fasting provides an exceptionally visible symptom of something that might well be relatively easy to fix, and I suspect if framed as such you could make a lot of headway. Like most religious practices that run afoul of science, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about correcting them, and nine tenths of the latter is allowing people who believe in “larger problems” control over the narrative.
Golly, I never knew that I was such a big part of the problem…thank you for for the edification
In reading your response, my first middle-class instinct was to start with something like “oh yes, of course I respect everyone’s religious beliefs…” And then I started actually thinking about that comment, which led to the following question: “Why the hell do we automatically respect religious beliefs such as those that keep pregnant women fasting during Ramadan?”
Maybe if you believe that the Earth is 6000 years old, or that an all-powerful God cannot forgive sin without human sacrifice, or that divine intervention cures some people of their disease but never amputees because God hates the shit out of amputees, then your beliefs do not warrant respect. Any respect.
And yet, most of us do not feel at liberty to call bullshit on these religious views… why? I wondered. The problem is it’s not socially acceptable to say any of the above: so, I’m saying it now. Most religions are so plainly bullshit that they not only don’t deserve respect, but rightly deserve derision, and Islam is as high up on this list as anyone.
Consider the theory the George W. Bush ordered the 9/11 attacks. Or that the moon landing was faked. Or that Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia or wherever. Or that the Star Wars prequels were not total garbage. Or that Olive Garden is Italian food.
If anyone espoused any one of these beliefs, we would not only laugh at them and call them an idiot, but we wouldn’t feel at all bad about doing it. It takes an extraordinary amount of idiocy to believe any of these things, and chastising people for holding such beliefs is good, corrective behavior for our society and civilization.
Now look at religion. To be fair, let’s start specifically with the Judeo-Christian tradition. And more specifically the story of Noah. We’re meant to believe that Noah gathered up two of every animal. Even a child with little concept of biology understands that this is laughable, in terms of the time it’d take to gather the animals, and the space needed, and the food, and the problem of managing all the species on the boat to keep them from eating each other. And I’m not by a long shot the first person to point out the absurdity of the story.
Are we really to believe that among all the other animals, Noah somehow made room for two elephants on his boat? Oh, wait. Scratch that. Six elephants, because there are of three different species of elephant, the African bush elephant, African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. Noah’s Ark also contained not two but eighteen tigers. That is, if we’re going to include things such as subspecies and breeds as different animals. The Bible isn’t particularly clear on this. At a minimum though there would have been eighty cats on the boat.
We’re also supposed to believe that Noah collected the panda from Southeast Asia, while also grabbing a pair of polar bears from the Arctic and a couple of spectacled bears from the Andes. The Andes are in South America. Just think about this a bit.
There are nine species of bear living today, and fifteen subspecies of the brown bear. Unless God and Noah sat down and had a debate of which type of bear is best and just agreed on one for Noah to save we’re talking about a whole lot of bears for him to not get mauled to death by.
There’s about 2,700 species of snake. Many of them like to eat from time to time, with mice being a pretty popular meal. So did Noah’s Ark just have big barrels filled with tens of thousands of mice to feed the snakes? And what about the two mice that needed to be kept for breeding after the flood subsided? Were they set aside from the start, or did Noah just ration things perfectly so that there would be exactly two leftover and just by lottery of not being pulled out and fed to the snakes did those two become the chosen mice?
And of course two of every one of the 40,000 species of spider. There weren’t enough glass jars in Judea to pull this off.
We all know it’s absurd, yet we’re not allowed to say that someone is a moron for believing in it. In almost every other context you’re allowed to call out this level of stupid. You think Obama is a secret Muslim? You’re a moron. Yet, that’s still more likely to be true than the story of Noah and the flood. Can’t point out the idiocy of believing that though, because it’s religion, and religious idiocy is inexplicably off limits.
Some people will argue that they don’t believe in the literal truth of those stories, and that they’re just there to teach us valuable life lessons about loving one another, or not pissing off God because he will murder every single person if you do, except not really any more. The flood was a one-time thing and he’s over that now. So, not really sure why we need the story other than to let us know that God was once a dick. It’s like your current girlfriend admitting that she cheated on a previous boyfriend but assuring you that she’ll never do it again. Even if you believe she won’t, what was the point of telling you?
Things that might be reasonably argued as morality tales aside, what about all the laws that the Jews have to follow and Christians don’t? Things like not eating shellfish, or touching dead pigs, or wearing mixed fabrics, or trimming your beard. Christians believe that when Jesus came he created a new covenant that swept away the old laws and replaced them with a kinder, gentler code of conduct. That’s not just a metaphor, that’s what Christians have to believe to get around not obeying the very explicit commandments of the Old Testament.
So Christians believe that in addition to being a sacrifice to pave the way to atonement for our sins, Jesus also peeled and deveined the shrimp, or whatever the specific magical process is for making them clean and safe to eat. And that’s not the proper subject for derision? Why is it not okay to make fun of people for thinking that sometime between the years 0 and 30 God decided that he didn’t like the mountain man look and decided a bit of facial manscaping was okay?
Because the vast majority of the country will say they believe this sort of thing. They don’t though. Not really. No person with a survivability level of common sense could possibly have a sincere belief in these sorts of things. Catholic doctrine holds that through transubstantiation the wafer and wine offered up at mass literally becomes the flesh and blood of Christ. Literally. It’s one of the things that separates them from other denominations is that they believe this is not symbolic.
They can all see the wafer. They’ve tasted it. They know it looks and feels and tastes just like a non-transubstantiated wafer, and that the wine is still in every way perceivable wine. In a blind taste test they’d have no way of telling you what was plain old wine and what was the blood of Christ. Yet, they will insist that the wine really does undergo a literal transformation.
There is no possible way they believe this. It’s a lie that two people tell to each other out of fear of what the other will think if you don’t tell it. But we have to know that no one else really, truly believes in these things.
Tolerance is not inherently virtuous. It’s only “good” to be tolerant if what you’re tolerant of is good, like Led Zeppelin – or at least just not too bad, like Def Leppard. In other words, tolerance is only as good as what it is you’re tolerating.
For example, if you believe that The Godfather II was better than the first Godfather, well, that belief has some sound reasoning behind it. This is a belief worthy of tolerance. Believing in the mythology of the Bible or the Quran though? Or believing that the death of Jesus Christ made shrimp safe to eat? There is no value in tolerating such beliefs.
Yeah, sure, religious persecution has a pretty bad rap. I’m not saying we should be rounding up and burning believers at the stake. People do have the right to be stupid, and so we must suffer them. We do a lot more than that though. We don’t just let religious nutjobs keep to themselves in creepy dark corners of the internet. Instead we create a completely backasswards litmus test for presidential candidates, and candidates for almost every other public office, which requires them to publicly announce that they hold these unfounded, irrational beliefs. Such as that huge number of Muslims we both know would simply shrug off any medical findings of “Ramadan fasting being damaging to the fetus…” and chalk it up to Western infidels trying to strip them of their cultural and religious traditions.
It’s no wonder we can’t have a sensible national debate over issues such as poverty, or welfare, or abortion, or contraception, or the death penalty, or minimum sentencing guidelines when in order to get elected every candidate has to proclaim that some 2000 years ago Jesus made it okay to put both bacon AND cheese on your burger. And it’s no wonder that we can’t get representatives with a basic comprehension of economics elected to work on the budget when a large portion of the electorate considers a candidate’s views on the conversion of the Baconator from unclean to clean to be more important than their substantive education and experience.
The reasoning for this is just as nonsensical as the beliefs themselves. We go about pretending as if these beliefs are completely legitimate because we don’t want to rock the boat. It’s not a matter of tolerance, it’s simply the path of least resistance in getting through our day to day life, because if you were to point out the obvious fact that the Emperor has no clothes, the crowd will not immediately join you in laughter. The crowd will insist that the Emperor does have clothes, and besides, whether or not he has clothes is a matter of personal belief and how dare you suggest that other people are looking at a stark naked Emperor. If you’re in Waco, TX, well, the Baptists might ask you to leave Luby’s without your complimentary chocolate sundae. And if you’re unlucky enough to be in Riyadh or Islamabad (or Deerborn, MI) the crowd might just stone you to death for being a villainous infidel…
Cazart.
I responded to your post here. Thanks for following up!
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