Religious tolerance is oatso simple

I’ve started eating porridge. I waited and waited for the weather to get colder, but at some point it becomes obvious that I’m going to lose the staring contest with BBC Weather and I just break out the oats and jam. All year, I’m just waiting for winter to come around. So now I’m eating porridge every morning, I’ve committed to that for the next few months.

Now, I want you to feel at ease with your choice of breakfast treat. Despite the fact that I’m fairly certain there is no finer way to kick off a miserable day of trudging through South Kensington than a warm bowl of gloopy oats, I don’t want to preach about it. You want to continue eating Shreddies? That is absolutely fine with me. Similarly, I don’t feel like I’m missing out. Yes, there are other cereals available. More pressingly, there are those that opt not to have cereals at all. But that’s alright, because I’ve made a choice for personal reasons, and it’s the right one for me. I’m Angry Geek, and I start my November mornings with porridge.

If we were to, say, replace porridge with ‘atheism’ (bear with me here) and cereals with religion (I have no idea what muffins/crumpets represent here, you can continue the analogy as you wish) we have an entirely different discussion. I have decided not to believe in any god or gods, and I’m comfortable with that decision. Admittedly, there are some mornings when my spiritual porridge has too little milk in and it goes all stodgy, but I manage to push on and stay true to my decision without trying to justify it to every motherfucker who braves the cereal aisle in Sainsbury’s.

Others seem less capable of doing this. I found myself last week in an extraordinarily overlong conversation with several staunch atheists about whether or not it made sense to choose one religion over any other. They delighted in laughing at Christians in general for this reason (“Why not Judaism? Why not Islam?”), and when I suggested that perhaps many people felt modern-day religions all expressed the same basic truths, this was entirely unacceptable. Why? Fuck knows. Everyone involved in the conversation had porridge for breakfast... I mean, was an atheist. Whatever. Maybe both – I never enquired as to their morning preferences.

We were all atheists, yet for some reason we had to debate this meaningless detail of an alternative lifestyle, as if the mere existence of Christians in our immediate vicinity represented some kind of flaw in our own reasoning. Why is Crunchy Nut still on the shelves if porridge is so obviously right? What is the purpose of marmite in this period of rolled oats and preserved fruit? For some reason these weren’t just idle topics of discussion, but fierce points of contention.

It was a couple of weeks ago in Felix that Sam Horti mulled over the question of an afterlife. Surely in hell we would feel no pain, he mused. How would we experience pleasure in heaven without nerve endings and a hypothalmus? Ho ho ho.

The only answer I can offer is that I don’t know. I don’t know how much milk you should put on your Weetabix to avoid complete loss of structural integrity. Maybe hell is, as I’m often told by religious friends, an expression of being absent from God. An infinite stretch of time where you are devoid of the hope of a saviour. Maybe you just put the milk on in little bursts and wait for it to be soaked up before adding more.

I don’t know. But it means nothing to me anyway, because I am having porridge for breakfast tomorrow, and will continue to do so. If people start trying to pour cornflakes into my bowl, I might be urged into action. But in the meantime I think, as porridge eaters, we promote our preference for warm, tasty breakfasts in a far more responsible and reasonable way by allowing other cereal choices to coexist alongside our own.

Next week - why same-sex marriages are a human right, explained through comparison with chocolate bars. Feeling hungry? Email me with your culinary preferences: anangrygeek@gmail.com.