Julian Baggini expresses some of his misgivings about the 'new atheism'. This is one of them:
For me, atheism's roots are in a sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead us. That means the real enemy is not religion as such, but any kind of system of belief that does not respect these limits on our thinking. For that reason, I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent believers, and isolate extremists. But if we demonise all religion, such coalitions of the reasonable are not possible. Instead, we are likely to see moderate religious believers join ranks with fundamentalists, the enemies of their enemy, to resist what they see as an attempt to wipe out all forms of religious belief.
I don't disagree with this, but I'd want to go further. It isn't only a matter of tactics. You can't sensibly be a proponent of reason and not be willing to listen to and engage with people's reasons. To state what should be obvious, religious believers also have reasons; and even atheists, convinced as it's possible to be that the religious at some point in their thinking abandon reason, have to acknowledge the possibility that their own reason may be failing them somewhere. It's what it means to be open to reasoning. That isn't to say that there's never occasion to refuse to engage with someone. You might like to avoid getting into a discussion with an out-and-out Holocaust-denier, for example, or a fervent racist ideologue. But in such cases there's usually a moral judgement involved - about your potential interlocutor's integrity or their 'qualification' for being treated in a considerate way. Outside such cases, a kind of ethics of rational discussion dictates forms of respectful engagement.