Are all atheists this ill-informed about religion?

[TheRocketSurgeon]

How do you explain evil from an atheistic worldview?  Is there real good and evil; or is it something you entertain when you want to make an argument against God?

It may sound like I'm being silly here, but I'm not. I actually think there's something akin to the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system, in real human personalities, by which a two-axis scale ranks people according to their good/neutral/evil nature, and their attitude toward law and order versus having a more chaotic spirit. Nine possibilities.

Now, I don't believe that "good" and "evil" are real things. They are sort of placeholders for an idea of things we consider harmful, but really, you don't describe a hurricane as "evil" even though it does great harm. It takes intent to be evil. Agreed, so far? The person who looks to others and is selfless is "good", while the person who is selfish and cares little for whether they harm others (reduced/no empathy) is "evil", on my scale. An evil person may never do any actual harm; they simply need to conduct their actions as though others are less worthy of consideration from one's self, and would not care as much if they got what they wanted by harming others. It is essentially a question of what we choose to do with our own power, especially as we get power that is disproportionate to that of others.

For those who are Lawful, they believe in orderly systems, hierarchy and authority, and following strict codes. They find comfort in that sense of structure and conservatism. They are the forces of preservation and tradition and stability in society. The Chaotic are the free spirits, the ones who don't like to be confined by roles or tradition, and they are the creative minds who dream of new things and want to try new approaches. They may have no problem following rule sets, as necessary, but would walk right through those walls if they perceived them to be such. They are the rebels, the forces of change and imagining (as per the John Lennon song), of our wild spirit.

Some (perhaps) people are not as strongly so, in any of these directions, and are best described as Neutral; they will do what seems best to them in each situation. We are complex beings, and a Lawful Good person might break tradition and every rule in the book, doing great harm to others, if they believed in the cause (it's one of the reasons we fear religious indoctrination of others so much-- this is how you convince a good person to do terrible things to others which they would not do otherwise, as in Pat Robertson's recent comments about making gays wear "special colored" clothing... perhaps pink triangles will suffice, Pat?). The hippie who follows no social rules, who walks with his head down so he doesn't step on an earthworm, and harms no one in this world but would help anyone he could, is an example of Chaotic Good. Emperor Palpatine from StarWars is an example of Lawful Evil, using manipulation of people and the system/power structure to achieve his own ends. Chaotic Evil is the Joker, of course; some people just want whatever they want, and don't care if the world burns down around them.

I consider myself Neutral Good. But whatever we use to describe these ideas, it seems clear to me that evil is not a real thing, except in terms of the basic premise that everyone wants to live in society as unharmed by others as possible, and so we define the ideas of human good and evil in terms of that premise.