A heathen manifesto

Atheists are too often portrayed as bishop-bashing extremists and any meaningful debate with the religious becomes impossible. How can this be remedied? At the Guardian Open Weekend, Julian Baggini presented his 12 rules for heathens:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/25/atheists-please-read-heathen-manifesto

1 Why we are heathens
2 Heathens are naturalists
3 Our first commitment is to the truth
4 We respect science, not scientism
5 We value reason as precious but fragile
6 We are convinced, not dogmatic
7 We have no illusions about life as a heathen
8 We are secularists
9 Heathens can be religious
10 Religion is often our friend
11 We are critical of religion when necessary
12 This manifesto is less concerned with distinguishing heathens from others than forging links between us and others

"It has long been recognised that the term "atheist" has unhelpful connotations. It has too many dark associations and also defines itself negatively, against what it opposes, not what it stands for. "Humanist" is one alternative, but humanists are a subset of atheists who have a formal organisation and set of beliefs many atheists do not share. Whatever the intentions of those who adopt the labels, "rationalist" and "bright" both suffer from sounding too self-satisfied, too confident, implying that others are irrationalists or dim.
We need a name that shows that we do not think too highly of ourselves. This is no trivial point: atheism faces the human condition with honesty, and that requires acknowledging our absurdity, weakness and stupidity, not just our capacity for creativity, intelligence, love and compassion. "Heathen" fulfils this ambition. We are heathens because we have not been saved by God and because in the absence of divine revelation, we are in so many ways deeply unenlightened. The main difference between us and the religious is that we know this to be true of all of us, but they believe it is not true of them."