by Howard Fitz

Created on: January 18, 2007   Last Updated: April 20, 2007

At 13, I was looking in an encyclopedia and seen a picture of biblical scholars sitting around a table and underneath it read "biblical scholars revising the bible". At that time the word revising meant the same thing as re-writing, I'm 13. That picture nurtured a seed planted by my father at the age of about 11, "religion is a white mans invention [paraphrased]". I started stating I do not believe in god, my older sisters started taking me to church and it did not help all I heard was an old man complaining about "young folks nowadays". One morning my sister turned it on KKDA 730AM to heard Minister Farrakhan, I never heard of him and I thought aw hell another preacher, the next Sunday I was looking for that station but I did not know what organization he represented.

A few years later, I was in high school, an upper-classman invited a friend of mine to a Muslim meeting, without knowledge I wanted to go. I could not sleep that night I went to that meeting for the Minister said so many unheard of concepts that my 15yr old brain could not stop working. We continued to go off and on throughout that football season, I got my license that summer going to 10th grade and I resumed my meeting participation for the rest of my high school years. I joined the Nation of Islam 6/7/92 at the age of 16, three days before my 17th birthday.
Coming into the Nation at such an early age, Christians would say, "oh you just going through a phase" or "you'll be back", I didn't like that at all. My early years were spent studying Christianity [dismantle it] since that is the belief that has my people. Everybody believes they are on the winning team so I was not trying to be beaten in no debate on the subject of being apart of the right religion.

In the Nation we are taught to read everything we can get our hands on, the more I read the more questions come that continued my research and I wanted to be as great an orator as the Minister. With all my study I have never crossed the term "personal god concept" a friend introduced it to me at the age of 30, he has always been on a different path which created balance in my views, not the regular box-thinking religious concept, we never ever debated each other or even spoke in lengths on religion. I looked for a rebuttal to that concept and knew quickly it wasn't any. My analytical thinking was "I can't use scripture for that concept and I can't use my belief, for it is not theirs". Then I looked at my belief using another filter, taking

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>