New Atheism
A lot of buzz has caught the waves about the New Atheism, led by such writers as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. New Atheists have been called militant in their call to not only disbelieve themselves, but to do away with religion on the whole. I think my favorite criticism comes in the form of calling them fundamentalists.
This whole thing tickles me for a great number of reasons. First of all some act as though Atheism is a unified movement, but nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly some can easily fit within certain labels including Atheist, Free Thinker, Humanist, Materialist, and Nihilist. The problem is that even though those broad brush strokes will indeed capture large numbers of people there isn’t a unified faith behind Atheism as there is in the Theist world, and even then few agree on much of anything. Catholics come in all shapes and flavors, and honestly the only thing they have in common is attending a Catholic church and calling themselves Catholic. This is the same with any religious movement. Until recently I didn’t realize that most people didn’t know that there are several major types of Islam, or that there are major divisions within Buddhism. With Atheism we don’t even have the benefit of working off of a finite set of inspirations. Christians have their bible, and Muslims have the Koran. What to Atheists have? Certainly there is a wide variety of influential authors but none of them are canonical in any sense.
Unification among Atheists resides in other places such as science. We tend not to quibble about the meanings of Newton’s laws since they’re quite obvious. But the thing is that we don’t hold science as a religious viewpoint as some fundamentalist Christians would lead people to believe. Most Catholics I know have the same views on Science that I do: it is an attempt to model the world around us and understand how things work. Catholicism had its fight with Galileo and has long since come to peace with science. Being largely mythicistic (is that even a word?) allows you to do that.
The unifying factors of Atheists are simple: lack of belief in a god and the supernatural as a whole. Yeah, many will argue that perhaps spirituality may have some basis, and that some supernatural beliefs may simply be uncovered science, but overall the view of God as popularized by the big religions is considered a pile of hooey. So yeah, there are those in the Atheist world that view religion as incredibly dangerous or the big factor holding humanity back instead of helping us move forward to whatever eudaimonia one may envision. There are also ones that believe it best to pick the beneficial parts out of religion and leave the obvious falsehoods behind (Thomas Jefferson anyone?). The spectrum of Atheistic belief is quite broad and honestly leaves a lot of room for some quite lively discussion.
So honestly this spectre of New Atheism isn’t quite what the news would like people to believe. Hell…they obviously haven’t spoken to any good quality Nihilists among whose ranks I’m usually counted…though I’ve mellowed out as I’ve gotten older. 
On an side note, I’ve read Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and honestly I enjoyed it greatly. I found it like reading Nietzsche in that even on the points I disagreed with I found myself enjoying his emphatic writing style. I highly recommend it to everyone who wants to see a challenging view of things, agree with him or no. I still have to pick up Letter to a Christian Nation, though, and I haven’t gotten around to reading any of Dawkins’ work as yet, so I can’t much comment on his writing outside of articles and debates. I do applaud them both for standing against a vast majority and calling them on their bullshit.