What’s discouraging about this is how many people will try to argue with you factually. Will try to show you that God has blessed those who have fastened and increased their health.

I have Muslim friends in Detroit who fast, and for the most part I respect them because their hearts are in the right place, and they’re not fundamentalist religious practitioners anyway. (I mean, I’m very openly gay so it would take a fairly liberal Muslim to be friends with me beyond superficially.) For them, Ramadan is symbolic and even kind of practically optional. For them, practicing Islam is a personal or cultural choice they don’t get very caught up in except maybe when their parents are around.

I think about my own kind of fundamentalist religion (the one I was raised in), which is Protestant Christianity, and I see a similar phenomenon of people following customs that they feel are mandatory and handed down by God, and I see them not critically thinking about that. It’s discouraging.