ABSTRACT
This chapter explores new atheists' attacks on religious morality and provides an overview of their attempts to find other sources of guidance. It also emphasises the distinction between the critical and prescriptive dimensions of new atheists' work on morality to demonstrate that, although these are frequently conflated, they are actually distinct. New atheists raise several shared critiques of religious morality, which collectively support the contention that religion actually encourages and shields misconduct. Critics of new atheism often mischaracterise the moral prescriptions set out by its most prominent writers by conflating the many different approaches to morality that new atheists explore with a single new atheist moral doctrine that does not exist. Mischaracterising the homogeneity of new atheists' prescriptive moral theory facilitates these attacks by making it possible to attribute the views of one new atheist to the movement as a whole.
