Overall there seems to be a gross ignorance of not only religious teachings, but religious history, and whatnot. At best, most atheist arguments seem to apply only to one form of religious expression(fundamentalism), and completely ignores the vast variety of religious forms that do exist, not to mention the numerous religious-based critiques of fundamentalism.
So they pick out a few people who argue poorly and just debunk these straw men instead of your real arguments?
Gosh, that sounds familiar.
Anyway, the argument here seems to boil down basically to:
1)
Modern popular atheist writers are obnoxiously anti-religious and lack the emotional punch of older ones,
Agreed. I find Hitchens and the others entertaining sometimes, but they don't have anything on Nietzsche. Also agreed that young dogmatic atheists are pretty obnoxious themselves--any atheist who claims absolute certainty in his position is a moron.
2)
Many modern atheists seem to forget the historical importance of religion and/or don't know anything about it in the first place,
Also agreed. There are definitely lots of stupid atheists.
3)
Many modern atheists seem to think they can completely debunk faith simply by debunking funamentalism.
That's not necessarily true--there are some people who believe this, but I don't think most atheists believe they are debunking non-fundamentalist forms of faith when they debunk fundamentalism; they just see no reason to even address such forms of faith.
In fact, Dawkins himself points out in chapter one of The God Delusion that his book is only concerned with literal fundamentalist religion!
Non-fundamentalist faith never makes any empirically measurable claims, so trying to prove or disprove it doesn't really make sense. It's a decision that's made pre-rationally, as I understand it, so truth/falsehood is irrelevant because it makes no falsifiable claims.
Fundamentalism does make lots of falsifiable claims--I guess your point here is that fundamentalists do not represent nearly as great a majority of religious people as atheists like to pretend they do.
And on that point, you're probably right. I'm an atheist (though not a gnostic one) and I do appreciate and respect God's historical and social importance, even if I think he doesn't literally exist. I fully agree with the statement that:
"If God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
I think the modern atheist authors you speak of here have gained prominence largely as a backlash toward the recent rise in popularity of ridiculous fundamentalist Christian and Islam sects in a post-9/11 environment.
Hitches excepted (who describes himself as anti-theist), I don't think most modern atheists are targeting you, Peguy, or intelligent faith in general. They are writing these angry works as a reactionary stance to the scarier forms of fundamentalism that have had a recent resurgence in popularity--I simply don't think they think they've debunked your brand of faith.
The problem is that so many religious people grossly misunderstand the nature of faith, and they give you a bad name. You're right that we shouldn't assume that all religious people are stupid fundamentalists, but surely you see where this perception comes from in today's media environment.