Perfect, I'd be happy to elaborate…

To answer your question, when I use the term "transcendent standard bearer" I am essentially referring to God, but I use that term because I think my argument by itself only leads us to a transcendent, moral agent of some sort - not necessarily the God of the Bible.

The reason we need a "transcendent standard bearer" is because when we say that something is truly "evil," we are referring to something above and beyond both our subjective judgements and the natural world. That is, without God, our moral instincts are nothing more than by-products of our evolutionary programming. So one's instinct to rescue a child from a burning building isn't any different in nature than a teenage boy's instinct to hump anything that moves.

I would not argue that we need a God to give us right and wrong, per se. We can still use reason alone to deduce principles for the best way to live and organize a society that encourages human/animal flourishing. Sam Harris argues this, comparing it to a chess game. There are certain objectively wrong ways to play chess, if the stated goal is to win the game. Just the same, there are objectively wrong ways to behave as a human, if the stated goal is to win at human flourishing. I agree with him on that.

But the problem with that is that it takes for granted the starting point: that human/sentient life is intrinsically valuable. That notion seems to me, on a naturalist worldview, to be nothing more than a very useful fiction at best. It's like telling kids about Santa Claus and his naughty list. It's total bullshit but it keeps them from hitting each other.

And if moral ideas are nothing more than useful fictions, then we're not justified in saying that evil is incompatible with God because we're not justified in believing in evil as a concept at all.

Hope that makes sense! Thanks for the thought provoking exchange.