I used to self-identify as an atheist while I was deconstructing my fundamentalist past. I was always a bit annoyed by some of my fellows, as they seemed less interested in understanding what was behind the religious impulse, as they were in just bashing religion (though admittedly I went through this stage as well).
This article here explains a lot. They really aren't neo-atheists. Their old-school anti-theists. Atheists like Sartre and Camus actually had helpful insights:
Reza Aslan: Sam Harris and "New Atheists" aren't new, aren't even atheists
Excerpt from the article:
Disenfranchised by what they viewed as an aggressively religious society, personally threatened by a spike in religious violence throughout the world, and spurred by a sense of moral outrage, a certain faction of atheists among an otherwise rational population of people who doubt or deny the existence of God reverted to an extreme and antagonistic form of anti-theism. This is the movement that came to be called New Atheism.
The appeal of New Atheism is that it offered non-believers a muscular and dogmatic form of atheism specifically designed to push back against muscular and dogmatic religious belief. Yet that is also, in my opinion, the main problem with New Atheism. In seeking to replace religion with secularism and faith with science, the New Atheists have, perhaps inadvertently, launched a movement with far too many similarities to the ones they so radically oppose. Indeed, while we typically associate fundamentalism with religiously zealotry, in so far as the term connotes an attempt to “impose a single truth on the plural world” – to use the
definition of noted philosopher Jonathan Sacks – then there is little doubt that a similar fundamentalist mind-set has overcome many adherents of this latest iteration of anti-theism.