Hawthorn

Earlier in the week we saw the hawthorn blooming in Horton Lane, at which time ours was a few days behindhand. It has now caught up and is passably illustrated left.

The Lumia did not seem to be able to decide which bit to focus on, and with a rather lumpy object of this sort does not seem to be able to focus on all of it at once. The eye does rather better with its virtual image, a dynamic construct of tricky software if you like, with the real thing, as produced by the Lumia, not up to snuff at all. So what is the reality?

PS: a few days ago I showed solidarity with one Wendy Doniger over book burning in India (see 17th April), this showing taking the form of having a pop at kindle over its inadequacies as a vehicle for encyclopedias. Then yesterday I came across an interesting article by her in the NYRB, interesting but depressing in her depiction of the power of the religious right in India, religious of the Hindu religion that is, represented on this occasion by a retired school teacher with a taste for litigation. Also in the echoes from the comparable Christian groupings of the US. I learn that, inter alia, the antique Hindus managed an accurate computation of the speed of light. For those interested, I believe that the basement of the Hindu temple in Neasden (http://londonmandir.baps.org/) includes various materials about this and other computations. At least it did when we visited.

But I continue to think that one should not expect a true believer from any religion to take kindly to religious studies of the sort practiced by Ms. Doniger. Comparative studies, or even studies of one religion by a believer in another, require all the religions to be on a roughly equal footing and few of today's true believers believe that the world is big enough to accommodate more than one family of gods. Not to mention the even more exclusive monotheists who allow just the one god, with even our own three in one (see http://www.3-in-one.co.uk/ and http://carm.org/trinity for two contrasting views) scarcely amounting to a family. In the olden days things were a bit better with the ancients cheerfully admitting that everyone was entitled to their own gods, although in the case of the Aztecs they did claim that their gods were bigger and better than yours.