Back in the mid-2000s, atheism ruled the internet. A tendency that became known as “New Atheism” sprung up, with a few prominent public intellectuals publishing best-selling anti-religious tracts, most notably Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (2004), Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (2007). Atheist forums proliferated online as the current succeeded in fomenting a great deal of discourse over whether religious beliefs were harmful.

I was in high school in Florida when the New Atheists came to prominence, and I remember finding Dawkins in particular an exciting and refreshing figure. These were the George W. Bush years, in which right-wing Christians were using faith to justify everything from banning stem-cell research to invading Iraq. It was satisfying, in this atmosphere, to see an erudite British scientist show up and explain that religion was logically indefensible.

Even then, I never cared for Sam Harris. He spoke in crude stereotypes about Muslims and justified brutal “war on terror” policies. As I grew up, I saw that Dawkins, too, was less of a calm, empirical reasoner than he seemed, and he would eventually become notorious for making ludicrous bigoted comments of his own, like suggesting that the bells of English cathedrals are objectively more beautiful than the sound of the Muslim call to prayer.