The Importance of Respecting Religious Beliefs

In the last few years there have been quite a few militant atheists giving very forceful critiques of religion. Are you sympathetic with that approach? I'm all for the vigorous debate of ideas, and people like Richard Dawkins have written wonderful stuff making the case for atheism. But some of the so-called new atheists tend to lump all religious believers together as though there's no significant difference between Islamist suicide bomber or naive Christian creationist. So I think it's important for humanists to work with those sorts of people and recognize what we have in common as human beings.