There's an interesting essay at Positive Liberty: While Europe Slept, by Jonathan Rowe. It made me stop and think. I'm an advocate for peaceful co-existence with religion; and have debated this up and down the blogs in recent times along with lots of other opinionated folks with diverse notions of how we relate to religion and to religious believers. The author of the above essay also advocates the gentle conciliatory approach, but with a bit of a twist.
You may want to read Jonathan's essay first, and then come back here to see what wisdom I can add. Because -- despite being a milk and mildness atheist myself -- I can see scope for my more hardline "new" atheist colleagues to use the same evidence Jonathan submits to argue for a negative effect of mild tolerance.
Jonathan adds a wrinkle to the notion of tolerance. He proposes that the founding fathers of the USA had a conciliatory approach to religion in which they deliberately promoted a notion of "authentic" religion that was consistent with their own secular ideals of liberality and tolerance. No matter that the actual divines of the time were still burning heretics and seeking to promote their notion of "right" religion with all the possible force available... the founding fathers deliberately chose to single out and promote forms of religion that were "compatible with liberal democratic, secular, pluralistic norms".
Jonathan proposes that we should be doing the same thing right now, with Islam. That is, in talking about Islam we should at every opportunity emphasize that "authentic" Islam is a religion of peace. As he says in the essay:
Whenever I criticize the more extreme elements of Islam, I always stress that most Muslims say this doesn’t represent the authentic version of t ...