Why the New Atheists don't get it

It seems to me that the New Atheists - Dawkins, Atkins, Hitchens, and all their other friends whose names disappointingly don't rhyme so well - are no longer classic atheists but anti-theists. Their perfectly reasonable not-believing has transmogrified into a largely irrational positive (or negative?) anti-belief, and they actively and aggressively seek to stamp out belief in God and the supernatural.

The New Atheists are brilliant, best-selling and highly entertaining, but I believe they completely and unfailingly miss the point at all levels. Here's a starter list of why - I'll try and unpack each in later posts if I get time.

• Dawkins & co utterly fail to understand the religious concepts of 'faith' and 'mystery', mistakenly equating the former with blind belief in the face of evidence and the latter with obfuscation and a reluctance to explore or investigate. No thinking Christian would accept these definitions - I'll need another post to explore what we do mean by them.
• They fallaciously assume that God is an alternative explanatory hypothesis to scientific theories of evolution, the Big Bang etc. In fact no-one except the New Atheists, the Creationists and their Intelligent Design cousins is trying to bring God into science at all, as to do so is to make a fundamental category error.
• Following from this, they misapply the Principle of Parsimony (Ockham's Razor) to 'disprove' God because it's simpler to explain the universe without invoking God. (Dawkins also badly misapplies mathematical probability in an attempt to show that God is so improbable as to be impossible.)
• They believe that if science/reason can find mechanisms or reasons for the universe, humans, consciousness, conscience etc, then God and religion are no longer valid or necessary (as they are merely wrong alternative explanations for these phenomena). In particular, if reason can suggest mechanisms for the evolutionary development of religion itself, this must render it invalid. Logically, these are non-sequiturs, based on a confusion of physical cause with purposeful or personal cause. 
• Similarly, they are commited to ontological (as opposed to methodological) reductionism, which confuses composition with meaning, failing to understand that the essence of anything is not the same as the sum of its component parts, and that (for example) a disassembled human being is no longer a person but merely a corpse.
• They fall into the profound and basic error that God is of the same type of being as imaginary mythological creatures such as fairies, goblins and unicorns. If God is God at all, he (apologies for male pronoun) is the Ultimate Reality, the eternal and infinite uncreated source, the Ground of all Being. He is not merely a 'god', simply a part of the created universe; he stands beyond and before and beside all else; 'in him we live and move and have our being'. (In this sense, they are actually right that God does not exist - technically he pre-exists, or super-exists). 
• The New Atheists are committed a priori to philosophical Materialism - the non-demonstrable presupposition that physical matter/energy is the central and sole reality. They then use this supposition to 'prove' by circular argument that God cannot exist and that any god would either have had to evolve or else be designed in an infinite regression of designed designers. (Incidentally they also fail to recognise that the whole of science is based on the premise of the universe being rationally intelligible, for which there is no scientific basis but which makes perfect sense within a theistic cosmos.) 
• They are also stuck firmly as fossils in the Modernist weltanschauung, and thus see science as the only valid truth-finding and truth-telling discourse and means of knowing, which supplants and supersedes all others. They therefore reject all other ways of knowing and understanding, such as the relational (the means by which we know people) or the poetic and symbolic (the means by which we understand truths that cannot be expressed in formulas). They also downplay or disallow alternative types of evidence and means of arriving at truth such as those employed in historical and legal discourse.
• They conveniently (and fallaciously) assume that religious texts must only be taken literally and that all true religious believers must be scriptural literalists - and therefore fools. It's unfortunate they are backed up in this by the very vocal minority of Creationists. 
• They are at a complete loss to account for religious belief in intelligent people, particularly scientists, falsely assuming that their beliefs must be somehow in spite of their intelligence.
• They make a very strange and non-demonstrable case that moderate religious belief is what allows religious extremism and fanaticism to flourish - that C of E churchgoers somehow prop up or lead to 'God hates fags' nutcases and suicide bombers (by the same argument, do moderate atheists prop up the extremists who would advocate killing religious believers?). They do not bother to distinguish between different kinds of religion or spirituality, lumping both good and bad, reasonable and ridiculous together as superstitious rubbish. This seems to demonstrate not clarity of analysis but rather lack of understanding.
• They imagine that morality, meaning, significance, purpose, human dignity and rights, true love and community can all be constructed and sustained perfectly well in the absence of theism / God. Unfortunately, both reason and experiential evidence are against them in this as I'll try and unpack later.
• They believe that religion can and should be stamped out, failing to recognise that religion is embedded in the human being as deeply as sexuality or the instinct for survival. It's particularly ironic then that the New Atheists are in some ways more deeply religious than many nominal churchgoers! I do not believe it is possible to eradicate religion from humanity even were it demonstrable that it would be desirable to do so. As the old adage has it, the correct response to mis-use is not disuse but right use, and the correct response to the abuse of religion by fundamentalists, terrorists and oppressive religious authorities is for each one of us to use the religious impulse for the common good.

Finally, and this is not an argument against their reasoning but their methods, the New Atheists have often lapsed into such unreasonable ranting aggression and arrogance in their fight against religion that they have sadly come to resemble the religious fundamentalists they deplore. Even if they were right that religion is a delusion and a scourge, their methods and behaviour in trying to rid the world of it would strongly argue to my mind against the goodness and reasonableness of their alternative. Any revolution won by such means merely replaces the old oppressors with new and more deadly ones.