With enough time, practice and effort I hope to be as clever a writer as Emily, who has this to say about defending your right not to have a God:

But what bothers me is that my total lack of religion is perceived as a blank space to be filled with some god or another. Au contraire, my not-religion is just as firm in my mind as religion is to those who follow it. I’m not so much an atheist/agnostic as someone who has no doctrine about the theological and devotes herself instead to the here and now (is that what secular humanists do? I forget). The trouble is in defending this way of life to people who wish to convert me. They see it as a lack of something necessary, while I see it as a lack of something unnecessary.

I’m going to carry that last sentence with me for the rest of my days. Thanks, Emily!
“mormons”