Does standing up and saying "you're being deceitful, you're being harmful and participating in the things you are supposable against?" mean saying "you people are idiots or non-people or the source of all evil?" There's a difference. I can be against their behaviors without making them sub-human. Perhaps I failed to some extent, as it was certainly not my intention. If the "New Atheists" are against the evils that religion has caused – human suffering, mainly, then you don't go about it by saying something as stupid as one cause is responsible or more importantly, one group.

Terry Eagleton's book "Reason, Faith and Revolution" http://www.amazon.com/Reason-Faith-Revolution-Ref... (also an atheist) does a good job criticizing this group in a useful way. And even more importantly, Eagleton actually knows something about religion aside from the strawmen Harris, Dawkins, etc. seem to understand.

The key to any move forward is going to be done through dialogue on all sides and by all sides reigning in the deriding of the other.

Some of my favorite writers and thinkers are atheists (as is a much loved and admired brother of mine) but I am not talking about atheism in general here, I'm talking about a group of people who regularly make sweeping, outlandish statements (often supported by bad data as Harris does in his book) that seek to demonize most of the human race.

Is it a problem when religious people do it, too? Yes, of course! But if atheists want to maintain any sense of moral superiority before us crazies they need to be more rational and better at kindness than we. But the Emergent conversation is generally very aware of those in our own camp who are less than gracious against our brothers, but the "New Atheist" conversation is becoming less and less civil and more and more ideological and that is a threat to what common goals we share.

For all your post talks about atheists "demonization of the Other", your post does exactly the same thing, making the atheists "the Other" because some of them are choosing to evangelize in much the same way as churches of all faiths have done for centuries.

But what I often think gets missed is the point they are bringing up, which is that religion kills. And it does. I so wish we could create a dialog between Christianity and atheists to see they are trying to accomplish much the same thing: the end of religion.