Matthew Burkholder

A friend of mine recently started a pretty huge debate regarding evolution on his facebook page. I normally try to stay out of these debates because I find them quite frankly, irrelevant to the Christian faith. There was a time when I spent a lot of time reading and researching the different views, but as I've gotten older, they've seemed like a side show to the gospel. I am quite aware of the claims by certain fundamentalist that if you reject a literal creation, you somehow undermine the entire truth of scripture. I've sat through several Ken Ham lectures, and read lots of books on creationism, and this is certainly an all or nothing, black or white claim I find extremely frustrating. For this reason, I very much appreciate you saying: "I do not make belief in a six-day creation a  necessary  mark of orthodoxy or a  necessary  mark of a Christian." There certainly are people who do, and I appreciate this viewpoint entirely.  However, I've been wanting t...

I'm excited to announce that a new author has decided to contribute to The Invisible Image. Andrew Barley is a very close and dear friend to me and I am sure that you will appreciate his thoughts on a variety of subjects. I am looking forward to reading his work, and I am sure you all will be challenged by what he has to say. Hopefully we can keep each other motivated to keep this blog current!

I am going to make this quick. I don't really give a crap about MTV. It's about as valuable to me as a sack of garbage. The fact that MTV has produced cultural gems such as "Jersey Shore" and the like, shows that it is a completely irrelevant television network catering to the lowest form of human entertainment. The generation that supports the tripe trope of sloppy human beings doing stupid things allows neanderthal television producers to keep making ridiculous, morally unrestrained nonsense and slap it on television. I'm actually mad that I am actually spending time thinking about something that happened on MTV, but there is one aspect to this story that I find strange. If you find it sad that a young, and once innocent girl could do such a thing on television, I must remind you that every single time you see any women who is degrading herself sexually on television, was once just like young Miley - only instead of staring in a Disney show, she was prob...

For a while now I've wanted to right down some of the thoughts about my old band kidikarus' one and only album. I know there will probably be about 8 of you that actually listened to the record, but for some of my close friends and bandmates, I figured they might want some insights into the record, and a jam session with 3/4 of the band last week brought back a whole slew of memories. I'll try to remember as much as I can about the recording and writing process. It's been about 5 years since the band disbanded, but I still think and miss my band almost every day. If you want a physical copy of the album, email me at mburkholder@gmail.com and I'll try to get one to you. Have a listen while you read. The first track is at the bottom of soundcloud (I will try to get better quality mp3s soon!) https://soundcloud.com/matthew-burkholder 1. Satus will you take me, my heather? accept, this sacrifice i'll lay down my life for you ... but her calls yoke, is s...

" We believe in Marx, Freud and Darwin. We believe that everything is OK   as long as you don’t hurt anyone,   to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your definition of knowledge. We believe in sex before, during and after marriage. We believe in the therapy of sin; we believe that adultery's fun. we believe that sodomy's OK we believe that taboos are taboo. We believe that everything is getting better despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence must be investigated. You can prove anything with evidence. We believe there is something in horoscopes, UFO’s and bent spoons. Jesus was a good man just like Buddha Mohammad and ourselves. He was a good moral teacher although we think that his good morals were really bad. We believe that all religions are basically the same, at least the ones we read were. They all believe in love and goodness.They only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation. We believe that after death comes No...

I went to go check out a childhood friends facebook page in the winter of 2010. I hadn't talked to him since I was a teenager. I soon found out that I would never talk to him again, I did a quick google search and found out that he had been apart of an online gaming community. I tracked him down to some forums where I suddenly became away that something tragic had befallen him. The last time I had talked to him was shortly after I moved back to southwestern Ontario. I don't remember much of the conversation, except that he told me he was feeling depressed. I was 13 at the time and depression was just a word that I thought meant "sad". We caught up, talked about the trivial things that 13 year old boys talk about, but something wasn't right. We never talked again.  Now 15 years later I was reading these words about a person who was once a close friend of mine. "What a f***ing coward." or "I can't believe someone could be that selfish....

This morning my family slept in pretty late. We have all been feeling under the weather for a week or so, and my wife and daughter especially have been feeling sick. The girls decided to stay home, and I was planning on staying home as well. Then at about 10:45am I suddenly had this urge to attend a Catholic Mass service. I have never in my life attended a liturgical service before. I have never been to a Catholic service before. There is a Catholic Church located about 3 minutes from our house, and the service started at 11:00am, so I decided to drive down and check it out. As a music leader at my church, I occasionally go to other church services to try and learn ways to improve our church service. This morning was one of the most valuable learning experiences I have had so far. This is essentially my experience at my first mass. I walked in the door and noticed a sign that read "No gum chewing, and no water. Thanks for the respect!" This is certainly different than...