I don't know if it's only first-generation, the jury will be out on that one for a long time, perhaps many generations there is a clear pattern, which Dawkins

I don't know if it's only first-generation, the jury will be out on that one for a long time, perhaps many generations there is a clear pattern, which Dawkins seems to embody, that new atheists are MORE religious than their parents, but they are pious of their non-deistic beliefs and they very strongly preserve the religious-based culture they stem from in terms of moral values and societal norms the danger in this, which we are observing now, is that their ability to predict the dynamics of society is worse not better than that of plain old religious types - because their own piousness is invisible to them and they engage in deranged stuff like assuming people will just default to their hierarchies of values and morality, once the religious rooting and background of their moral beliefs is removed the obvious thing to assume would be the opposite, that humans would resort to their historically documented patterns of behaviour and repeat the intense conflict of the past to adjudicate moral disagreements, which the previous state of stand-off had already paid its dues to - and those conflicts were violent and bloody, which should bring us pause in our desire to go back to a state of "new religion" even if this one is based on the state-of-the-art science of the day and might be not deistic in the common sense of the word TLDR; in the sense of moral belief, it's not clear whether it would be better to have a non-religious society (non-coherent in moral values and collective moral rules) or even if such a thing is possible, or could be stable over time. My gut instinct is that (moral) atheism and collectivism are a bomb of a combination that is unlikely to end in anything other than disaster, and my egoistic belief is that I'm much happier if people believe in exotic supernatural stuff but it's neatly compartmentalised into the private sphere and controlled public spheres, than if they start a crusade to uproot the collective's beliefs, which will likely affect my livelihood - I see the New Atheists movement as an effort to destroy a very desirable state of affairs, not a grand goal of ushering in a rationalist Utopia