As an adolescent I was obsessively polite. I had learned that people were less likely to hate me if I never contradicted them, and I tried desperately not to offend anyone. As a result, I had few enemies but not many friends either.

Writing was the place where I went in order to say what I really thought. It was where I could express and explore the things that mattered most to me without fear of being unfairly judged.

I was afraid of being judged because I had a big secret: at fifteen, I did not believe in God anymore. This was a big deal in the conservative and religious South Carolina town where I grew up. I never confessed it to anyone because I was afraid of being hated.

My writing was my only confidante. Beyond being a forum for religious doubts, writing has been my “underground” for anything that was hard to express to others, a place where my real personality could emerge.

But since the fearful days of my adolescence, something has changed. Instead of writing all my thoughts in private journals, I now have a blog. I share my writing. Readers are able to react to the things I say.

Not everyone approves of them, which is something I learned painfully last week. The kerfuffle went like this: My brother called and told me that many of my conservative and religious family members from South Carolina were upset. They were baffled, offended, and disturbed.

This was because last week I presented a post called “The Final Word.” It was meant to be humorous, but it was also personal and touched on topics I care about deeply.

It was a pretend journal entry written by a Future Me right after my death. It dealt with the fears that haunt me in my effort to grapple with the brevity of life and what it really means to be human. For that reason, I loved my story, and many readers told me that they did too.

But there was a part in the story where Future Me had called God “a coy bastard” for not showing up at my death. Incidentally, the piece was my first foray into on-line profanity. Normally, I avoid it, not because I think profanity is wrong, but because the times I have used it, it seemed inconsistent with my natural “voice.”

But since Future Me was dead, I thought the occasion called for a special vernacular. I was happy when a friend I consider a master in the art of cussing told me that I had pulled it off like a pro.

I had made the “coy bastard” remark in jest and my intentions were harmless, but my family failed to see the humor and apparently viewed what I wrote as a vicious attack against that which they held sacred.

In many ways, this response was my worst fear come true, but I had known that at some point, it was bound to happen, although the adolescent in me that wants to be liked by all, or at least not hated, is still there.

But I remembered that Stephen King wrote that any writer who was unwilling to offend is in the wrong profession. He said that if you begin to write honestly, you are bound to offend at some point.

I agreed with him, which is why I have made no secret of my agnosticism in this blog. I have written about my personal experience of becoming agnostic several times, particularly in the posts “The Beauty of Uncertainty” and “How I Became an Agnostic.” Every time I posted an agnostic blog, I tensed, prepared for a coming firestorm of disapproval.

But it never happened, at least as far as I knew. Until last week.

After all of my nonfiction confessions, for some reason, it was my fictional piece that struck a nerve. At first, I was disturbed that my family was disturbed. Upsetting anyone had been far from my purpose in writing my story. If anything, I thought the story was comforting; I think the ability to laugh at death is the most powerful tonic against the fear of it that we have.

But my family apparently thought I had said “coy bastard” in a fit of meanness.

Meanness, no. I had certainly never meant to hurt anyone. But I have to admit there was a moment of catharsis. I have often felt frustrated by the unquestioning acceptance of the idea that God must remain remote and hidden, leaving people with the burden of “faith” to follow the command of believing, which goes against how our brains are wired to know things.

The faith command is terribly confusing; it leads people to wildly different conclusions which become “convictions.” Since the convictions contradict each other, many believers “solve” the conflict by censoring and repressing opposing views or attacking those who hold them.

If there is a God who has chosen to remove himself from the grasp of reason or sensory perception, then it has been a brutal decision. Considering the many irrational wars and executions over religion, there have been few things more divisive, and more hampering to empathy, love, and communication than the imperative to have “faith.”

No one ever explains why God needs to be so remote or why, whenever he performs a miracle, he will only do it in such a way that it can be explained in other ways. There is a tacit understanding that God needs to stay hidden in the spirit world, so that people are forced into the supreme virtue of “faith.” Why?

I answered that question in my own mind when I was 15. Early I had to deal with the loss of my belief in an afterlife. Death became a reality that I faced alone because I could not talk to anyone. It was frightening at first, but it made me love, even more, the life that I had.

Even though I share my writing now more than I used to, it is still the place I go to in order to say things that are hard to say in person.

There is no avoiding my non-theistic understanding of the world in my writing. The transition from belief to non-belief was formative and profound, which is why I refuse to leave it out of my writing in an effort not to disturb anyone.

I hate for my writing to have anything less than a positive effect on anyone, but life can be scary and being human is hard. I am going to say what I think about it. If my perspective grinds against what someone else thinks, I will accept that as the price of writing honestly. If I lose readers because of it, then I will have to lose them.

That being said, I have no particular want to convert family and friends to my way of thinking. At the same time, I want to be understood, and there seems to be no way to do that without explaining, at least to some degree, my train of thought.

To do that, I use words. I care about words, even naughty ones, because I care about writing.

That is one reason I have trouble with the conception of a God who is obsessed with censoring words and the thoughts that underly them; or that he cares more about belief and image control than love or the problem of human suffering.

I would expect so much more of a creator who spun gas into galaxies of stars, laid out the laws of the universe, and breathed life into inert atoms.

I would like to think that if an infinitely powerful and wise God did exist, he would be strong enough to meet scrutiny head-on and even welcome skepticism, secure in the conviction of his own reality.

It is hard for me to imagine that such a creator would take offense at my story in which I called him a “bad word,” especially if he, as an an omniscient being, knew billions of years in advance that I was going to write it.

I like to imagine that, instead of raging at me or being “hurt” by being called a coy bastard, he might instead laugh and say, “Yeah. I can see how you might think that. Would you like to talk about it over donuts and coffee?”

And if he ever did, I would probably say yes. I might even spring for the donuts, because I think that maybe I could love a God like that.