Random atheist: “There’s no such thing as good and evil.”
Random theist: “Oh yeah? Then why is murder wrong? Why shouldn’t I just murder you?”

(I’m paraphrasing…)

For fuck’s sake. This is another tedious bit of damnable wank from Facebook. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a bit of a writer or what, but it frustrates the bejesus out of me when people have long, tiresome arguments about something while completely oblivious to the fact that they’re only arguing about definitions or categories. This happens all the fucking time.

Everyone agrees that there are pleasant things and unpleasant things. Now, we often disagree about which is which, as with Marmite, but it’s trivial to recognise that everyone accepts some sort of a continuum from extremely pleasant at one end to extremely unpleasant at the other. Despite the fact that pleasantness is subjective, people actually agree more than you’d think. While people will disagree about music and food, almost anyone will tell you that murder falls at the “extremely unpleasant” end of the spectrum.

Ask an atheist whether murder is pleasant or unpleasant and they will say unpleasant. I don’t want to be murdered, I would be very upset if anyone I knew were murdered, and therefore I pronounce murder as extremely unpleasant and endorse making it illegal. I wish to prohibit extremely unpleasant behaviour so as to move our society towards the pleasant end of the continuum. None of this is difficult to understand.

Now, whether you want to use the word “evil” as a synonym for “extremely unpleasant” is entirely an argument about words. Some people will want to, some people will not, and it doesn’t change the meaning in the slightest either way. Some theists, when they use the word “evil”, seem to be using it merely as a synonym.

But other theists aren’t. Some apparently want there to be a separate category of things that are “evil”, a category distinct from merely “extremely unpleasant”. And this is where theists and atheists differ. I think some things are very unpleasant. Of course I do. It’s impossible for anyone not to. Occasionally, and casually, I might call those very unpleasant things “evil”. I am using the word as nothing more than a colourful synonym, for emphasis. If a theist tells me that “evil” is something different, something separate, something in a distinct category off to the side all by itself, then I will respond that not only do I see no reason to believe that, I also see no reason to desire it. The world works just fine without the extra, redundant category.