The Corpse in the Cellar by Kel Richards Read Free Book Online Page A

impertinence to me!’
    Jack laughed and said, ‘Come on, let’s see if we can get some lunch downstairs.’
    Ten minutes later we were seated in the snug with a pint and a pork pie in front of each of us.
    Warnie took a long sip from his glass of bitter, smacked his lips and said, ‘That’s what I call real ale.’
    Jack was wolfing down his pork pie as rapidly as usual when I said, ‘Now, it seems that we have time on our hands, so how about that debate we never quite finished on our walk this morning?’ Jack nodded as he swallowed a mouthful. ‘You proposed,’ I continued, ‘that there’s one way of looking at the world that sees it right, while all the others see it slightly out of focus or distorted in some way.’
    â€˜Indeed,’ Jack said, pausing before he took another bite. ‘And I go further by giving that true way of seeing the world a name—Christianity.’
    â€˜And that’s where you just can’t be right,’ I leaped in. ‘You’re making the mistake—the arrogant mistake, if you don’t mind my saying so—of treating your world view, Christianity, as being somehow “more equal” than all the others. That just can’t be the case. All world views are equal, and all should be regarded with respect.’
    â€˜In that case, young Morris,’ Jack responded with his booming voice and his big, broad grim, ‘you are respectfully wrong.’
    â€˜Hang it all, Jack, you must see that all these options are pretty much equal. All the major world religions—Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and so on—are ancient and widespread. Each is held to be true by intelligent chaps. And atheism is much the same. There have been atheists since the dawn of time, and there are probably more today than ever. You see what I mean—all equal, all doing the same job of making sense of the world for someone, of providing a picture of what the world is like and how it works. So perhaps it’s just a matter of what suits you.’
    â€˜So you’re saying, are you, young Morris, that “equal” means “the same”?’
    I sensed that I was walking into a trap here, but I couldn’t say no because that was pretty much the point I was making. I just nodded.
    â€˜Nonsense!’ laughed Jack as if I had just made some hilarious joke. ‘Mind you,’ he added more soberly, ‘you’re not the first to fall into that trap and you won’t be the last. It’s becoming more common for people to make the mistake of thinking that “equal” must mean “the same”. Mrs Pankhurst, or at least her more radical suffragettes, made the mistake of thinking that women could only be equal to men if they were pretty much the same as men.’
    â€˜But surely—’ I protested.
    â€˜Hear me out,’ said Jack. ‘The fact is that “equal” never means “the same”; it always means, and must mean, “equal but different”. That’s what the equals sign means in mathematics, and that’s what the word means in ordinary language.’
    â€˜Rubbish!’ I hooted back at my old tutor. ‘Not only rubbish, but illogical rubbish. Equal means identical. To be equal is to be exactly the same.’
    â€˜Really?’ asked Jack quietly with a gleam in his eye. And that gleam told me that my argument might be in trouble. ‘I’m no mathematician, but even I know that in a mathematical formula both sides of the equals sign are not identical, are not exactly the same, but they
are
equal. To give you a simple example, and because I’m hopeless with numbers it will have to be very simple, I could write twenty multiplied by five on one side of the equals sign and the number one hundred on the other—and I’d be perfectly correct. Each side of the equals sign is equal to the other. But they’re not