S2E17: Ambiguity of Culture and Religion in Science

Brian: Who went bowling? Was it us three? I won. That's all I remember.

Harjit: A hundred percent you didn't. I have proof.

Leen: I feel like I went, but I don't know what I did.

Harjit: You literally were the worst.

Brian: That's rude.

Harjit: No, she was the worst player. It's not rude. It's the facts.

Leen: Is the sound . . . No, I'm not going to use them.

Harjit: Can facts be rude?

Brian: That's a very . . .

Leen: Okay. Should we get started?

Brian: Yeah.

Harjit: Man, we ask deep questions.

Leen: Okay. So today in the studio we have a really good friend of ours, Brian Grover. He's a classmate of ours as well. Hi, Brian. How are you?

Brian: Hi.

Leen: How's it going?

Brian: So excited to be here. I've been asking you guys for, like, months.

Leen: We've been trying to get you on this for months. Years.

Brian: Oh, stop. I've been asking for months and finally I'm here.

Leen: I know. So today we're going to be talking about religion in the context of culture, in the context of ideas, and how it portrays to medicine. I feel like it's always our hallway topic. We kind of get together and we just start talking about why the world views religion or some practice in a certain way. And we don't necessarily say good or bad, but we just really think on that idea.

And we wonder, you know . . . for instance, I know one thing we've always talked about is how do patients view prayers and things like that, or how a community views prayers for a patient, things like that.

I think one thing that we talk about a lot that really gets to me, and I think I'm very passionate about it, is culture versus religion. And I want to kind of get your point of view as well on your experiences with your culture versus your religion.

I think one thing that really bugs me about being a Muslim in the United States is a lot of the stereotypes that people come up with and come to me with questions about or just really target the Muslim population with are really based off of extreme ends of culture.

It's not religion by any means, by any basis. And oftentimes, people will come to me and say, "Explain this," and I'll be like, "Oh, I have no idea. It's not my culture." And they're like, "But it's your religion." I'll be like, "Oh, no, it's not. We actually have no idea what this is, but it is portrayed that way."

I think one thing that's often portrayed that way is the way hijab is, the way women cover their head, right? It's like, "Do they wear a niqab? Did they not wear niqab?" Driving cars, that's another one, right? It's like that's completely culture. I have no idea what you're talking about.

So I think when it comes to medicine, what have been all your experiences with culture versus religion from your background and then how you want to apply community engagement and learning to separate the two in your practice and medicine or in your careers in medicine.

Harjit: Brian is going to go first.

Brian: You want me to go first?

Leen: Go, Brian.

Harjit: You're the star of the show.

Brian: Okay. So I think it's something, especially with you, Leen, that we've talked about a lot, and I think because of your unique background of growing up Muslim in Cedar City, Utah, which is, you know . . .

Leen: Fun stuff.

Brian: Yeah. And I've always valued kind of your input and your experiences and the stories that you've told me from your upbringing and living there and kind of the interesting things that happened to you there.

And I think particularly when it comes to culture and religion, and as it pertains to medicine is an interesting topic because more now than ever we're being taught in medical school to actually be sensitive to people's culture and to their religion. And sometimes it's really hard to distinguish between the two, especially when we're interacting with somebody that it's not of the same culture or of the same religion.

And something that, you know, as a group of friends . . . we've been friends since like the first week of med school. The reason I've always enjoyed being around you guys is because of, you know, the diversity that we bring together and that we kind of share each other's beliefs and that we respect one another and that we can have fun, but also talk about serious topics.

And I think that's been really valuable to me because as a third-year med student and working with patients and clinics and in hospitals, it's really helped me kind of start to develop . . . it's almost a skill, right, to be able to talk with people of different cultures and different religions and learn what kind of questions to ask and what things to say and maybe what things not to say.

And it's been beneficial to maybe, you know, pursue those conversations with friends first so that, you know, I can kind of learn what things to say, or like I said, sometimes I'll put my foot in my mouth or say something I shouldn't say. And it's better that I say it around you guys than in front of a patient for the first time, and you guys have let me know that. And I really value your friendship for that.

For my faith as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon, it's actually been kind of interesting. Our church has been making this push lately to not use the word Mormon as much.

Leen: Oh, really?

Harjit: Oh, really? I didn't know that.

Brian: But start to try using Latter-day Saint more. And so I'm going to try and do that even though I'm used to calling us Mormon.

And something that's really unique about that and is unique to our medical school specifically, our medical school is in the middle of, you know, Salt Lake City, Utah, which is the capital, per se, of Mormonism, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And specifically, from my point of view, it's been interesting to grow up and try and, I guess, kind of explain myself, because there are so many things that you see in Utah from a culture perspective that may or may not pertain to our religion. And it's definitely something that I see on a daily basis, right?

So when I interact with people and they find out I'm a member of this church, you know, they automatically also may assume things that might be cultural or might be not necessarily based on the religion. And it's kind of interesting, because in the same way . . . one of the ways I see culture is if you were to take a big group of people, a big handful of people, you get people that are different, you get people that are weird, you get people that are different in their own little ways. And then you try and have them practice the same religion, and then out of that kind of comes culture sometimes.

So a lot of the things that we do in a culture may be like religion-based but may not be specifically following the religion. But it kind of happens when you bring a huge group of people that are different with different ideas and different backgrounds together and ask them to practice the same religion. And then, you know, culture kind of comes out of that. And that's something that's very, very prominent in my church and specifically in the State of Utah.

Harjit: I think I grew up kind of almost resenting my religion or faith. I also follow the Sikh faith. I kind of discovered my faith myself as in reading books and understanding it, and I realized that there is actually a separation between what's religious and what's cultural. Obviously, cultures are beautiful things and there are amazing things you can take from them, but there are also negative things that don't match with your views.

So there was a couple of things that I didn't like, and I was like,"Oh, this is actually my culture, not what my religion preaches." And I think when I made that realization, that was really transformative for me. And I think that's something that I would challenge everyone to do, is really understand what is the cultural thing and what's a religious thing.

Brian, I actually want to say I also really value our friendship as well, because I remember when I first started medical school, we actually all met on Second Look Day. And Second Look Day, it's basically you're checking out the school before you really want to go. But I know a lot of us already really want to go, but it's just like, "Oh, let me check this out and see if this is a good fit for me."

And when we were there, I remember you had come up to us and you really wanted to hang out and talk. And one thing I really value is that we can critically think about things together. We can question each other. We can really parse out what it means to be who we are as people. And you have never, I feel like, generalized the type of person I am just because of the way I look or the way I talk or the identities I identify with.

And I think that's kind of the key point for me. In medicine, in the future when I practice, I want to have conversations with my patients like I have with you and with Leen and with everyone else, all the other bundle of hers and our classmates as well.

Leen: If there was one stereotype that you can think of right off the bat that often comes up and you have to deal with and how it portrays more to culture versus religion, what would it be?

Brian: You go first, Harjit. I've got to think about it.

Harjit: I know. Me too. I'm trying to think. I think a big stereotype the Sikh faith has . . . actually, I don't know if this is a stereotype. I think people often don't know what it is. I think this has come out too. I think a lot of times it's not a stereotype, but it's a mixture that we're a part of either the Muslim faith or the Hindu faith. I think that's the biggest thing. So stereotypes-wise, we have the same stereotypes that Hindu and Muslim religions have.

So, Leen, you tell me a specific one because I'm pretty sure it's the same.

Leen: Oh, yeah. I can take a guess at that one. I think terrorist is by far the most common one that I come up. It's on the news. People tell it to my face. I'm like, "What is happening out here?"

Harjit: That's a common one that we have.

Leen: And I think that's very shocking to me when it first started becoming a stereotype, because I came from a religious background where, you know, the rules of war are you don't cut a tree, you don't hurt anyone who's not fighting you, you don't hurt agriculture, you don't hurt infrastructure. And then I hear . . . everybody is like, "Terrorist!" and I'm like, "What? What is this? This doesn't make sense to me."

Is there something like that, Brian, that you can relate to in the sense with the LDS faith?

Brian: Yeah. I think one of the biggest things, and one of the things that's maybe hardest for me because it's really not true of the majority of people that I know that I share my faith with, is a stereotype that members of the LDS church maybe are like judgmental or harsh towards people that don't think the way they do.

And I've thought a lot over the years about where this may come from, because I promise you the majority of people and the majority of members of the Church that I interact with very closely are not this way at all. So I always kind of wondered about why this comes across. If you do ask people, a lot of people will say it does come across that way.

And I think this kind of stems back to, you know, what we started on, with the topic with culture and religion. And you think of the LDS faith, the LDS church is kind of one of the more, I guess, strict churches out there, right? I mean, we have a lot of commandments, as we call them, and a lot of rules that we follow. And I think at the root of that is maybe just kind of a lack of communication really. And that's something that's unfortunate and something that, as a society, we need to strive to understand each other more and to communicate more.

Something that I feel very passionate about, and I'm sure you all do too, is if you grab a large group of people and they're practicing the same religion, some are going to act on it differently than others. And just because somebody chooses or one or two people choose to act on it in a wrong way does not mean that the whole group of people think that way or act that way.

Harjit: I grew up in Utah, so I feel like I understand individuals that identify as being Mormon from afar. Actually, I can't say I understand every single aspect of the religion or faith. There's a large population of Mormons in Utah. So a lot of times, what we tend to do as people is we obviously gravitate towards people that we have common interests with, common identities with, right? There are people in every single religion that do this. They gravitate towards people of the same kind.

But then there's also the type of people who reach out and want to communicate and want to, you know, have an exchange of conversation, who want to question their thinking and want to move forward. And I think you, along with other people in our class that identify as being Mormon, do that.

So, like you said, there's going to be a ton of different people, you know, in part of one religion, and sometimes it's the rough stuff or the negative. I wouldn't say negative. These negative connotations come from the people maybe who just stay within themselves, you know?

Brian: Yeah. And it's totally a challenge that . . . I have a couple kids at home, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, and something I take very serious as a parenting/teaching point is teaching my children how to have good and meaningful conversations with people that are different than them.

And that's a bigger challenge than I think a lot of times we realize. We talk about it all the time that children, when they're growing up and even in their adolescent years, their brain is not fully developed. And one of the things that is not developed is their ability to think abstractly.

So, for example, if you are to teach a child or a kid, an elementary age school kid or even junior high and even I'm seeing in the adolescent years, that smoking is bad for you, it's so hard for them to understand that if smoking is bad for you, a person that smokes can still be a good person, right?

And so these kids think, "Oh, smoking is bad. A person that smokes is a bad person." And I think it's so important to start at a very young age to teach them that people that smoke can be good people. And one of the only ways to teach them that, I think, is through experience, is through helping them to get to know maybe somebody that smokes and realize, "Wow, this is actually a really good person, and smoking doesn't define them at all or it doesn't change the kind of person they are."

And I think that we can extrapolate that to other people, so people of other races, people of other sexes, people of other genders, people of other religion, like we've talked about, and help them get to . . . The best thing, I think, is for our children to interact with and meet other people that think or live differently than they do and realize the humanistic side of those people.

Leen: Growing up in southern Utah, everyone around me was majority of the LDS faith, and I was the one stickler Muslim person down there. And I think, you know, living in southern Utah, I see how when you're part of a majority, they tend to group together. Again, it is exactly what Harjit said, in the sense we tend to group with people who we identify with.

And I think that was very difficult in southern Utah growing up, when we're trying to teach kids values versus not values. And if kids do not understand that separation between, you know, what's a value versus the person who practices or anything like that, it makes it very difficult for kids to get along and it almost makes it intimidating for kids to get along.

And so I think from that same idea, when I go back to Palestine, when the majority talks stereotypes about the minority, I kind of pause and I'm like, "Wait, that is literally me in Cedar City, Utah."

And so I kind of have this motto that I've created a long, long time ago, and it's if I ever have a kid . . . I do not know if I will, but if I ever have a kid, I want that kid to be raised in a minority setting because I feel like you gain so much insight. You gain the skills to teach and communicate and build bridges together. And then also be able to take two steps towards each other and really make a friendship out of that.

Harjit: So, Leen, I think that being a person whose identity is not a common one, be it religion, be it culture, growing up here I understand what you're saying. I think there's a lot of value in being a person who has to have that struggle, that fight of showing their voice, representing themselves.

And I think it's really important for kids and also adults. We don't stop growing. I think it's important for everyone to continue to learn how to communicate with people that are different than us, especially in a country like the United States of America where there is so much diversity. I think it's necessary.

This is to say being a minority obviously adds with it this struggle and this tension that makes you grow as a person. But obviously, there are also deficits of, you know, power and resources and stuff like that, that are damaging. But I do agree with the part where I think it's important that we are in environments where our thoughts are challenged. When we all are thinking the exact same thing, how are we ever going to grow? How is this bubble of knowledge ever going to get pushed, right? And how are we ever going to be able to use this awesome mind that we have?

And, you know, as humans, one thing my faith does teach me is we have the ability of having a consciousness that other species do not. So why not challenge that consciousness, right? And that's why I think it's very important that those are the skills that we take away from this.

Brian: I think what you guys are saying is spot on. And I think the importance of some time in your life experiencing a situation, an intense situation, where you're a minority is so valuable.

And for me, it was specifically . . . I don't think my experience was necessarily harder than anyone else's, but it was . . . The experience that I went through was being . . . I served an LDS mission in Argentina, and a lot of members of our church serve these missions. So I was in Argentina for two years. And I remember getting there for the first time and I got to Buenos Aires and then I got assigned to an area called the Rio Gallegos, which is in the very bottom part of the country.

I had had five or six weeks of Spanish language training, so I could say, "Como manzanas," or something like that. I really could not say anything. And I remember getting down there and I got sent to the very bottom of the country. It was June. I was thinking it was going to be hot because it's South America, but it's like backwards down there apparently.

So I get down there, I don't have a jacket, and I was freezing cold. I get off the plane and we walk in these companionships, is what we call them, where you get assigned to one other missionary and you work together. And my missionary had just gotten there from Italy. So I spoke English, he spoke Italian, and neither of us spoke Spanish, and we were in Argentina and it was freezing cold. And I was cut off from my family and wow.

I was a 19-year-old kid and I had just come from, you know, a pretty privileged background. I grew up in a nice community. I had gone to my freshman year of college. It was very stereotypical freshman year of college, you know, staying up late, hanging out with friends, doing fun stuff. Taco Bell runs at 2:00 a.m.

Harjit: I love Taco Bell.

Brian: Yeah. And I had just come off that, and then overnight now was put in this situation where I was in this country and living this situation. I was told to put on a white shirt and tie and wear a plaque, and I had never felt so ostracized in my entire life.

But what an incredible experience it was for me to live like that for two years and to maybe feel a little bit of what it's like to, you know, be a minority in different countries and to kind of be ostracized a little bit and judged a little bit and looked at a little bit differently.

And it was so valuable to me because those are lessons that I'll never forget. And I hope that moving forward . . . and it has. As I've done my short career in medicine, it's totally impacted maybe the way I look at people or maybe try and sympathize a little bit with people that are going through a hard time or maybe feel a little bit different or a little bit ostracized.

And then, once again, just to clarify, you know, everybody's experience is different. And I'm not saying mine was necessarily harder than anyone else's, but it was so good for me to experience that for a couple of years.

Leen: And I think, you know, coming back to medicine, those skills are absolutely critical in the sense that when you walk into that patient room, it's a new patient of a new background, of a new faith, of new values, whatever, every single time you walk into that room, right? And so it's almost like instantly you have to build those bridges and be able to understand patient position versus provider position. And I think you can kind of mirror that to these experiences as well.

Brian: And I think that that's so important. I think the most important thing that all of us can do in society is kind of learn what our contribution can be to others based on what we've been blessed with in our lives and helping others realize . . . or not necessarily helping others realize, but maybe looking to uplift other people and help them realize their full potential.

So I'm thinking a lot about patients and we see patients that come in with different backgrounds and different education levels and things, and some that need more help and more time than others. Some patients we see for the same condition, and one visit might be five minutes because of patient is really on top of things and one visit might be an entire hour because a patient needs a little bit more education.

I think it's so important to realize, and it's a skill set to realize, which patients need a little bit more attention and then acting on those thoughts and feelings and helping other patients to realize their full potential.

Leen: One other thing that I think we often talk about a lot in our little friend group here is the ambiguity of religion. One thing that we often talked about was the amount of prayers. Is there a threshold to which God will finally answer you, right? It's like, "We need a thousand prayers before God answers you." I think we had this conversation before, and I thought it was really awesome and I thought it opened my eyes to understand kind of how people view religion.

So what are your thoughts when it comes to community practices versus interpersonal understanding of certain practices of faith and religion?

Brian: Yeah, I like that question, especially because, you know, we talked about this the other day in the hall and it kind of sparked to this awesome conversation we had about one particular word that I love, and that word is ambiguity. I just think that's one of the coolest words. And I think navigating ambiguity is a really cool topic both in religion and in medicine.

And as I've gotten further along in my medical education, one thing I've started to realize is ambiguity as it pertains to medicine. For example, I'm starting to learn that we're required to make decisions with not very much information, with ambiguous information.

And we're supposed to teach patients when they ask, "Why do I have this disease? Why do I need to do this? Why is this happening to me?" We need to become skilled at giving ambiguous answers and being okay with those answers ourselves, right? By saying, "We don't know why this happens. We don't know how this happens, but this, this, and that."

And it's been something super interesting to me. And I can't think of anyone in particular, but there are so many people, particularly in medicine and in science, that have a hard time with religion. And that's a really interesting topic for me.

And once again, this isn't to point fingers or anything like that. It's just been an observation of mine. People that work in medicine and work in science are so good at being okay with ambiguous information, and a lot of times those same people have a really hard time being okay and accepting ambiguous religious information.

So for example, they're okay with telling a patient, "I don't know why you have this," or, "I don't know how this works." But at the same time, when they get into religious questions of how God works or why bad things happen to good people, kind of these big questions that seem to try to stifle religion, they're not okay with having ambiguous answers.

There was a quote by the prophet of our church when he dedicated one of the science buildings at BYU that I love. I don't know it word for word, but he basically said, "Science and religion aren't in conflict. There's just an incomplete understanding of science, there's an incomplete understanding of religion, or an incomplete understanding of both." I've really tried to look for that and it's really kind of enriched my life as I've started learning more in medicine of how to compare religion to science and to medicine in particular.

Harjit: You know, I actually love that you just articulated that because it's such an interesting thought that I've never actually thought about.

Brian: Yeah, it is interesting.

Harjit: But it's a thing that I want to think more about. You know, another thing that I can think critically about.

I kind of wanted to go off of what Leen and, Brian, you also said. So when we practice faith, I always think of rules as something that people interpret in different ways. Like you said, there are going to be like a million different types of people all following the same religion, right? So I think even the way we practice our own faiths is very personal. It's a very, very, very personal journey, right?

If you were telling me, "Okay, the rule is don't hop over the fence," and I'm a scientist or I'm a religious person, I'm going to be like, "Oh, can I go around the fence? Can I build a bridge and go over the fence?" It's like that.

Sometimes we don't have answers, but we're trying to reach that path. And that is where I think, for me . . . this is just my belief system. Both with science and with religion . . . and if people don't like the word religion, then faith or spirituality. We're all trying to reach an end goal, right? And we don't know what that is yet, but we're hoping on that journey of life we'll discover it.

And that's why I think that being a religious person, I'm completely fine with science because I'm like, "Yeah, bro. I'm doing the same thing." I'm on this path of finding answers, of discovering, of questioning things.

And I think one thing that I do want to put a plug for is I think there are a lot of judgments both sides. People who do not believe in religion have certain perceptions of people who are religious, and people who are religious have certain perceptions of people who are not religious.

And a big, big part of me is just like we all have different types of health and all our patients are different, people can follow their faith in whichever way they understand it and believe it. But that also causes a lot of problems because then people in power start enforcing their way of religion on other people and that mixes up what religion means to people, and they get confused.

And I think it's kind of like a sticky situation. In the end, I think I would just urge that, just like anything else, everything has a path and you just go on it and, on the way, discover things.

Brian: Yeah. And I've learned that from interacting with you guys and I think particularly what I'm getting a lot from what you're saying and what makes me think of is that although we all belong to different religions that practice different things, we're all looking for spirituality that's very similar, right?

Harjit: I agree with that.

Brian: I mean, we can get caught up in definitions all day long, but for me personally, religion and spirituality are kind of different, religion being to where you worship and things like that as opposed to spirituality, which is kind of like you were saying, Harjit, this journey to achieve inner peace and mostly that.

Harjit: Just awesomeness.

Brian: There we go. Yeah. Great.

Leen: You both reminded me of a story. My biochem class, I remember the first day the professor walks in and he says, "If you have a religion that's going to contradict whatever I'm going to teach you in here, leave it at the door. No offense here, but this is the science that I'm teaching and you leave religion at the door." I thought that was such a strange thing to say for me in the sense I was like, "But my religion supports the science." I mean, I've always grown up Muslim, right? But again, it was more of a cultural Islam than it was a truly religious context of Islam.

And when I got to embryology here in med school . . . I know culturally there's a big discrepancy between gender roles in my culture, and I always thought that was embedded in religion. Women tend to be much more in solitude at home and men get to do a lot more of the freedom things, right? And I always thought, "That's religion and it doesn't make sense to me because why would God give us two different roles if he created us the same way?" and things like that.

And I remember being in embryology class and we were talking about the bimodal gonad, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, we have both come from the exact same gonads. The only thing that is different is a hormone, and this hormone has one atom that's different from the other. But they're literally the same. And in women's bodies it's converted to testosterone and vice versa."

And that's when I paused and I was like, "Oh my gosh." That was my moment when I came to religion. It was in science class. And I said, "I think God is fair. It's more of the cultural context that brings it out of fairness in that sense."

I don't know. It was always interesting for me to hear people say, "Science is very much a matter of fact," but it never is. We can only make theories, but we can't make facts, right? And religion is kind of the same way where God says, "Look, here are my miracles. You believe in them through your interpretation or you can't." But again, it's theory versus fact, right?

I feel like I got a lot closer to my religion the more I went through med school, and I think it helped me kind of conceptualize that there are things that are unknown and maybe that can be . . . For me, the scientific process is a physiological process as we see and we fix and we monitor on labs and things like that. These are miracles to me. These are signs that God created these things for me, right?

Harjit: Yeah. And like I said, Leen, my faith also, I think, gave me the tools to be a critical thinker. So I think it's so important that you said that, because I think a lot of people enforce their beliefs on others, right? And that is, I think, where it's a huge no-no. You can't do that.

Leen: Religion, I think, is a much more deeper interpersonal concept than it should be a much more wider place on all kinds of concepts, right? I feel like you have to find it within yourself and believe it within yourself. I truly believe each one of us has a different universe and God kind of implemented religion in our different universe on our different path through the way our brains compute things, right?

Harjit: I believe that too.

Leen: And so it's almost like, for me, this is the way . . . yes, I'm Muslim, but my Islam is built this way in my universe because of what I see and what I do and how I've walked through this life. I don't know if that's kind of something . . . I think it seems like here we all kind of share that understanding in a sense.

Harjit: Yeah, I resonate with that.

Leen: Cool.

Harjit: Cool, bro.

Brian: Me too.

Leen: Thanks y'all.

Harjit: Sorry, I've been saying bro a lot, listeners.

Leen: I was trying to think how to close it, and then she said that and I had to add on. So I think this has been a great talk, and it's been so great to have you in the studio with us, Brian.

Harjit: Brian, we love you.

Brian: Thanks. I love you guys.

Leen: We appreciate our . . .

Brian: You guys are the best. Seriously. You're awesome friends. The word that I can think of most when I think about my friendship with you all is it enriches my life. And I think, like I said, having a good friendship with somebody who comes from a different background as me and getting to know them and realizing we have so much more in common than is different between us is such a cool thing.

And I just want something to go on record. I won the bowling game, so if you ever talk to Harjit about the time we went bowling the first week of med school . . .

Harjit: That is not true. I feel like I have to put this on Instagram.

Brian: I won the game.

Harjit: I have proof.

Brian: So that's now officially on record.

Harjit: I have proof

Leen: So for all our audience out there, please listen to Bundle of Hers, interact with us on Facebook, Instagram. We'd love to hear from you.

Harjit: I don't appreciate that you cut off my conversation, Leen Samha.

Leen: It's like religion. There's no known end to this conversation.

Harjit: That is true. Okay.

Leen: Bye.

Harjit: Bye.

Leen: Good job. Good job y'all.

Harjit: Brian, you did so good.

Leen: Yeah, you're so eloquent.

Harjit: You are so articulate. We're out here . . .