John Clayton

Thanksgiving is a season that is very much in accord with the themes and teachings of Jesus Christ.

The denominational world tries to pressure its members to focus on the birth of Christ, but in doing so layers of guilt are imposed, and competition gets complicated as one Christmas program tries to outdo the other.

Christmas is the antithesis of Thanksgiving. Christmas is pretty much a man-made holiday.

There was no instruction to be thankful that the Christians were special people, chosen people. There was no nationalistic, political or ethnic superiority to be thankful for.

Christians were instructed to serve others, and the thanksgiving was for the grace of God and the fact that God offered a way for man to return to a positive relationship with Him.

The emphasis on the birth of Christ tends to polarize our pluralistic society and create legal and ethnic belligerence.

It is my fervent hope and prayer that by exposing my mistakes and by pointing out the things that were a part of my early life, some who might be following the same paths might not make those same mistakes.

Thanksgiving is a time when the world gets to see just how blessed and how workable the Christian system is. The emphasis is not on giving or buying, but on being thankful and expressing that appreciation to God and to one another.

Was the real Jesus of history one and the same as the Christ of faith whom we read about in the New Testament and worship in the church? Was Jesus really raised from the dead? Is he really the divine Lord of lords?

Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.

There is no racial or ethnic involvement in Thanksgiving, and people who may be very distant from the Christian system can see the beauty and the positive spirit that comes from the holiday.

Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.