Matthew Burkholder

Consent and Liberty. That's it. That's the only thing governing the masses of culture regarding sexual expression. The battle was won quickly. A small single weapon shaped like a pill single handily loosed the shackles of temperance and chastity. We are all the illegitimate children of parents who failed to safeguard the ethos of our being. Lust is just another thing to be consumed. We love consuming, it's in our nature. We consume the world and we consume each other, one orgasm away from attaining some definition of meaning that isn't there. We are a generation out of control. I am not a saint. I live in the cognitive dissonance of the morality of my Creator. I battle the dark regions of the mind, winning and losing, hoping one day to be made whole. Religion is always enduring. People have attempted to squash it out, but it always has a way of resurfacing. The religious way of thinking, talking and acting will always influence us. To be irreligious is a contrad...

It's taken me a few days to try and process what happened this week. Our soldiers are suppose to lay down their lives for our citizens, not die at the hands of them. It doesn't make sense, and I don't think it is suppose to. Whatever delusional and disturbing sense of identity two people thought they had found, that they would take the lives of two soldiers, isn't suppose to be rational. My heart broke as I read of the mother of the Ottawa shooter, with no explanation for their son's actions, wanting to hate the very child she brought into this world. What happened was a terrible tragedy on so many levels. I must admit, my sadness quickly turned to concern. Words like "terrorism" began to quickly emerge from certain media outlets and individuals on social media. "Terrorism" is not a new thing in this country (FLQ), but usually (not always) refers to actions conducted by an organization. I am worried that a word is being used for emotional/p...

If you have any familiarity with the Bible, you will undoubtedly know the story about the woman caught in adultery found in John's gospel. According to the story, a group of religious leaders, scribes and Pharisees, bring a woman caught in the act of adultery demanding that Jesus act as judge over her fate. Jesus' famous retort: "let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her" is one of the most famous lines in all of scripture, known to most in the Western world. Without going into many details, there is essentially good reason to believe that the Apostle John did not actually include the story in his original writing - the chief reason being it's absence from early manuscripts. This is not to say that the story isn't historical - clearly Jesus historically was at odds with the religious leaders, and the gospel of Mark, the earliest of the gospels, records several instances in which the Pharisees confront Jesus (Mark 7, 8, 11, 12...