Archive for September 2007
Leviticus
Chapter summaries in Leviticus.
Leviticus 1 – Laws for burnt offerings of cattle, sheep, goats or birds.
Leviticus 2 – Laws for unleavened grain offerings.
Leviticus 3 – Laws for peace offerings of cattle, sheep or goats.
Leviticus 4 – Laws for sin offerings for unintentional sin for priests and Israel — a bull — and leaders and individuals — a goat or lamb.
Leviticus 5 – Some situations and accommodations for sin offerings; laws for guilt offerings of rams.
Leviticus 6 – Some interpersonal situations for guilt offerings; laws for the priests in conducting burnt, grain and sin offerings.
Leviticus 7 – Laws for the priests in conducting guilt and peace offerings; laws against eating fat and blood.
Leviticus 8 – Moses consecrates and ordains Aaron and his sons.
Leviticus 9 – Aaron conducts offerings for himself and Israel; the glory of the LORD appears to Israel and consumes the burnt offering with fire.
Leviticus 10 – Nadab and Abihu are consumed with fire for disobedience; further instructions for priests eating portions of offerings.
Leviticus 11 – Laws of clean and unclean animals.
Leviticus 12 – Laws for purification after childbirth.
Leviticus 13 – Laws for leprosy, burns, and contamination in garments.
Leviticus 14 – Laws for cleansing lepers; laws for contamination in houses.
Leviticus 15 – Laws for bodily discharge and for cleansing.
Leviticus 16 – The LORD institutes the annual Sabbath day of atonement after the death of Nadab and Abihu, involving sin offerings and a scapegoat.
Leviticus 17 – Sacrifices must be brought to the tent of meeting; laws against eating blood.
Leviticus 18 – Laws forbidding sexual immorality and child sacrifice.
Leviticus 19 – God is holy and requires his people to be holy; laws for interpersonal justice, and miscellaneous laws.
Leviticus 20 – Laws against child sacrifice, mediums, sexual immorality; God requires his people to be holy and separate.
Leviticus 21 – God requires his priests to be holy and clean.
Leviticus 22 – Laws concerning uncleanness and the holy things of the tabernacle; sacrifices must be without blemish.
Leviticus 23 – Feasts: the Sabbath, Passover, feast of first fruits, feast of weeks, feast of trumpets, day of atonement, and feast of booths.
Leviticus 24 – Lamp oil and bread for the tabernacle; death for blasphemy; an eye for an eye.
Leviticus 25 – Sabbath year and year of jubilee; redemption of property; kindness to fellow Israelites in poverty.
Leviticus 26 – Blessings for covenant keeping and severe discipline for covenant breaking.
Leviticus 27 – Laws concerning vows and tithes, and redeeming by adding a fifth to the value.
Exodus
Chapter summaries in Exodus.
Exodus 1 – A new Pharaoh subjugates Israel into hard labor and seeks to kill all male babies.
Exodus 2 – Moses is spared; Moses kills an Egyptian and flees to Midian; God hears Israel’s cries.
Exodus 3 – God appears to Moses and calls him to lead Israel out of Egypt into Canaan.
Exodus 4 – God encourages and rebukes Moses, appoints Aaron, foretells Pharaoh’s hardening. Return to Egypt; Israel encouraged.
Exodus 5 – Plea to Pharaoah; work is increased. Displeasure with Moses and Aaron; plea to God.
Exodus 6 – God encourages Moses; Israel despairs. Generations of Israel; Moses despairs twice.
Exodus 7 – God encourages Moses, foretells hardening and deliverance. Sign of rod, plague of blood.
Exodus 8 – Plagues of frogs, gnats, insects; Pharaoh remains hardened.
Exodus 9 – Plagues of disease on livestock, boils, hail; God purposes to proclaim his name. Pharaoh remains hardened.
Exodus 10 – Plagues of locusts and darkness; Pharaoh remains hardened.
Exodus 11 – Israel finds favor with Egyptians. God plans to kill Egypt’s firstborn, “make a distinction” between the nations, display his wonders.
Exodus 12 – Institution of the Passover. Israel is sent out of Egypt, in haste with plunder.
Exodus 13 – Firstborn sanctified to God; God leads Israel to the Red Sea.
Exodus 14 – Pharaoh pursues Israel; Israel rebels, but God delivers them through the Red Sea and they fear God.
Exodus 15 – Israel praises God for their deliverance. Israel grumbles and God makes the waters of Marah sweet.
Exodus 16 – Israel grumbles; God provides quail and manna.
Exodus 17 – Israel grumbles and God provides water from a rock. Moses raises his hands for the battle with Amalek.
Exodus 18 – Jethro returns with Moses’ wife and children, and sacrifices to God. Jethro counsels Moses to establish able leaders.
Exodus 19 – Pentecost: God, holy and merciful, charges Israel to obey and live as his people.
Exodus 20 – On the basis of their deliverance, God commands Israel to obey ten commandments, promising blessing to all who remember his name.
Exodus 21 – Laws about slaves, murder and livestock.
Exodus 22 – Laws about livestock, theft, negligence, idolatry, injustice and honoring God.
Exodus 23 – Laws about lying and injustice, Sabbath year, Sabbath, feasts, sacrifice. Promise of victory in Canaan.
Exodus 24 – Confirmation of the covenant, with sacrifices; Moses on the mountain with God.
Exodus 25 – Instructions for giving; instructions for the ark of the covenant, table for bread, and lamp stand.
Exodus 26 – Instructions for the tabernacle.
Exodus 27 – Instructions for the bronze altar, courtyard, and lamp oil.
Exodus 28 – Instructions for the clothing and ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests.
Exodus 29 – Instructions for the consecration of Aaron and his sons by anointing and sacrifice; instructions for daily sacrifices.
Exodus 30 – Instructions for the altar of incense, census tax, bronze basin, anointing oil, and incense.
Exodus 31 – Bezalel and Oholiab gifted and called to fashion the temple and its implements; command to keep the Sabbath; giving of the tablets.
Exodus 32 – The golden calf; Moses intercedes; the sons of Levi destroy 3000, and God sends a plague.
Exodus 33 – God will not go with Israel from Sinai; Moses appeals, and asks to see God’s glory.
Exodus 34 – God proclaims his name to Moses and renews the giving of the covenant; Moses’ face shone.
Exodus 35 – Moses reviews Sabbath law; Israel donates to the tabernacle.
Exodus 36 – Bezalel and Oholiab oversee the construction of the tabernacle.
Exodus 37 – Bezalel makes the ark, table, lampstand, altar of incense, anointing oil and incense.
Exodus 38 – Bezalel makes the altar of burnt offering, the bronze basin and the court. Accounting of materials used in the tabernacle.
Exodus 39 – The high priest’s garments; Moses blesses the work.
Exodus 40 – The tabernacle is erected and consecrated; Aaron and his sons are consecrated. The glory of the LORD fills the tabernacle.
Truth
Blaise Pascal (via Al Mohler) writes:
It is as much a crime to disturb the peace when truth prevails as it is to keep the peace when truth is violated. There is therefore a time in which peace is justified and another time when it is not justifiable. For it is written that there is a time for peace and a time for war and it is the law of truth that distinguishes the two. But at no time is there a time for truth and a time for error, for it is written that God’s truth shall abide forever. That is why Christ has said that He has come to bring peace and at the same time that He has come to bring the sword. But He does not say that He has come to bring both the truth and falsehood.
Fr Vincent Miceli writes:
The idea that unity is more important than truth is a particularly pernicious myth of our times. It leads to the disastrous conclusion that schism is a greater evil than the heresies and immoralities that penetrate and thrive within the Church. A doctor who cuts out a malignancy in time saves his patient, whereas one who leaves a malignancy untreated for fear of hurting his patient condemns that patient to certain death.
G. K. Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy (via John Piper):
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. . . . The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. . . . There is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it’s practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. . . . The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which makes him stop working altogether. . . . We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
Al Mohler writes:
This is our proper epistemological humility — not that it is not possible for us to know, but that the truth is not our own.
G. K. Chesterton writes (emphasis added):
Logic and truth, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with each other. Logic is concerned merely with the fidelity and accuracy with which a certain process is performed, a process which can be performed with any materials, with any assumption. You can be as logical about griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs. . . . The relations of logic to truth depend, then, not upon its perfection as logic, but upon certain pre-logical faculties and certain pre-logical discoveries, upon the possession of those faculties, upon the power of making those discoveries. If a man starts with certain assumptions, he may be a good logician and a good citizen, a wise man, a successful figure. If he starts with certain other assumptions, he may be an equally good logician and a bankrupt, a criminal, a raving lunatic. Logic, then, is not necessarily an instrument for finding truth; on the contrary, truth is necessarily an instrument for using logic — for using it, that is, for the discovery of further truth and for the profit of humanity. Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
Kurtis Smith writes, referring to postmodernism’s misplaced relativistic attack on power:
Nazism and racism aren’t horrendous because they’re violent. They’re horrendous because they’re lies.
John Piper writes on the necessary connections between friendship and truth:
Friendship hangs on believing the same gospel. The main joy of God-glorifying friendship is joy in a common vision of God.
See also Peter Kreeft’s article Comparitive Religions: The Uniqueness of Christianity.
Python combinations
In September 2007, Brian Adkins posted a simple Logo program to print all possible combinations of lists of items, and asked for alternatives in other languages. He provided a Ruby alternative which would translate fairly easily into Python. For my own Python implementation I decided to try a completely different approach:
prod1 = lambda elem, vec : map(lambda x : elem+' '+x, vec)
xprod = lambda vec1, vec2 : reduce(list.__add__, map(lambda elem : prod1(elem ,vec2), vec1))
choices = lambda x : '\n'.join(reduce(xprod, x))+'\n'
q = [['small', 'medium', 'large'],
['vanilla', 'ultra chocolate', 'lychee', 'rum raisin', 'ginger'],
['cone', 'cup']]
print choices(q),
I gotta have my orange juice. 