PZ Myers sums up my feelings on Atheism much more clearly than I can (emphasis mine):
That last term, “atheist fundamentalist”, is revealing. I’ve never heard anyone use it who wasn’t also exposing themselves as someone who wants atheists to sit down and shut up and “just get along”—people who want atheism to be dead ineffective and irrelevant. Harris and Dawkins are not fundamentalist in any rational sense of the word, and definitely not in the pejorative sense that Epstein uses. The “new atheism” (I don’t like that phrase, either) is about taking a core set of principles that have proven themselves powerful and useful in the scientific world — you’ve probably noticed that many of these uppity atheists are coming out of a scientific background — and insisting that they also apply to everything else people do. These principles are a reliance on natural causes and demanding explanations in terms of the real world, with a documentary chain of evidence, that anyone can examine. The virtues are critical thinking, flexibility, openness, verification, and evidence. The sins are dogma, faith, tradition, revelation, superstition, and the supernatural. There is no holy writ, and a central idea is that everything must be open to rational, evidence-based criticism — it’s the opposite of fundamentalism.
