They were never level-headed rationalists. I realize most of us were young when the new atheists got going but if you ever check out old content you can see they were always on the same tier of Howard Zinn and their understandings of history, philosophy and religion were always ideological garbage. They just won debates by tapping easily dunkable fundamentalists. !Christians !Catholics Checking in on the four horsemen, who were united only in their (admittedly a bit based) actual Islamophobia:

• Richard Dawkins: "So I call myself a cultural Christian, and I think it would be truly dreadful if we substituted any alternative religion."

• Christopher Hitchens: an actual card carrying communist and a liar

• Daniel Dennett: Took the materialist worldview down a strange path and believed consciousness was an illusion :

In this work, Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-producing features of consciousness is already apparent, and this later became an integral part of his program. He stated his view is materialist and scientific, and he presents an argument against qualia; he argued that the concept of qualia is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism.

This view is rejected by [Nobel Prize winning] neuroscientists Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Giulio Tononi, and Rodolfo Llinás, all of whom state that qualia exist and that the desire to eliminate them is based on an erroneous interpretation on the part of some philosophers regarding what constitutes science.

• Sam Harris: I'll avoid bringing up his fake PhD and instead turn to responses to his !sophistry:

On the next to last page of his book, Harris makes the telling admission that if people like male feminists, liars, and thieves could be just as happy as good people, then his moral landscape would no longer be a moral landscape; rather it would just be a continuum of well-being, whose peaks are occupied by good and evil people alike (p. 190).

What's interesting about this is that earlier in the book Harris observed that about three million Americans are psychopathic, that is to say, they don't care about the mental states of others. On the contrary, they enjoy inflicting pain on other people (pp. 97-99).

That implies that there is a possible world which we can conceive in which the continuum of human well-being is not a moral landscape. The peaks of well-being could be occupied by evil people. But that entails that in the actual world the continuum of well-being and the moral landscape are not identical either. For identity is a necessary relation. There is no possible world in which some entity A is not identical to A. So if there is any possible world in which A is not identical to B, it follows that A is not in fact identical to B.

Since it's possible that human well-being and moral goodness are not identical, it follows necessarily that human well-being and moral goodness are not the same, as Harris has asserted.

Co-opted by intersectionality.

Dawkins was (and is) happy to talk about how terrible Islam is for example, /r/atheism is waving Palestine flags.

You can't think people waving the Bible around have too much political power unless you also get behind 100 other causes .