I am happy to live in a post-Christian world. There are many things in my country's past that I am glad I did not have to experience first-hand but I am glad happened. 
The extinction crisis at the end of the Cretaceous era is a prime example. It was obviously a very nasty time to live through, a time which most animals, and most species, did not live through. But without that time of crisis the world we know now could not have existed. Our ancestors would probably have gone on being tree-dwellers, remaining small, staying out of reach of raptor-like predators on land and increasingly from the air as well.
Another nasty time to have lived through would have been the ice age, or rather many ice ages. These were chilly times to be sure but the advance and retreat of glaciers shaped my world. The ancestors of the the people of Britain and Ireland are the same as the Basques. Many of my ancestors would have arrived in this part of the world by walking here, something which would not have been possible without some extra thousands of cubic miles of sea water being turned to ice. The glaciers crushed and fractured rock and spread the resulting material far and wide increasing the soil fertility for millennia. The melt water from the glaciers carved out deep valleys in my part of England which ensures that even small streams sit in deep steep-sided valleys, it is almost as if there was a deliberate design to make water power possible, which powered the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution again was another period which I am glad to view from this end of the historical telescope. Without it I wouldn't exist, nobody who is alive today would exist, and the people who lived in my place may have been significantly poorer.
The second World War is another past event which I am grateful for, the defeat of Nazism and the beginning of the end for the British Empire, the start of the current era of stability, peace and unprecedented prosperity. I'm glad it happened and I'm more glad it happened in the past.
But the biggest thing I am happy happened and is in the past is Christianity. It made my country and my world better in many ways but its job is over. We now need to tease out the good things from our history and put them to work for us. The classic reactionary approach to atheism is not in any way helpful. Morality is not what the Bible says it is, but it is more certain that morality is not the exact opposite of Christian values. Nothing good is gained by trying to be the Antichrist. Antichrist indeed, what do they think this is, particle physics? We should draw up our morality in a sensible way and certainly not as a reaction to Christianity. There is no value in Satanism, pentacles and pentagrams, goat's heads, Earth goddesses, paganism, heathen worship, druids and witches.
For me atheism is the acknowledgement that there are no gods. It is not the opposite of Christianity. The very idea of an opposite to Christianity is absurd. What is the opposite of Las Vegas? That's a silly question isn't it? What is the opposite of liking Garth Crooks? What is the opposite of tapioca pudding? Just because something can be defined it does not follow that it has an opposite. There are surely more ways that one can not be a Christian than there are ways to be a Christian. Please, for the sake of the sanity of our species grasp the very important point that not being a Christian by virtue (and it is a virtue) of being an atheist does not require anybody to try to be the opposite of a Christian.
For me the problem with Christianity is that it is based upon false foundations. There are no gods. There is no special one and only god. This god who does not exist is not the Hebrew god. There is nothing special about the mythology of the Hebrews, it is only historical accident that so many millions of people around the world and down the ages have been taught to value Hebrew tribal mythology and to despise their own. Jesus was not a revolutionary moral philosopher upon whose teachings the world has been built, which is just as well, people who try to follow the teachings of Jesus often have a sticky end. The central dogma of Christianity, that mankind is evil and needs saving from hellfire is wrong in all its central claims. Hell does not exist. Judgment is not required. Souls don't exist and therefore cannot be tormented in any real or imaginary place. God who does not exist is not forced by some unquestionable higher power to punish anybody and finally the mechanism of vicarious redemption by blood sacrifice is nonsensical, magical superstitious bollocks which is thoroughly immoral. Nobody has the power or the right to take your sins away, or remove your culpability for them, before you are born and then make that forgiveness conditional on something as fatuous as belief, which comes down to making gullibility the ultimate moral value in the entire universe.
That is the set of problems I have with Christianity. It is more than sufficient. I have no need to hate everything that Christians have ever said or done. On the whole I think that Christianity has done enough good for us to forgive them their sins. Yes they have slaughtered millions of people around the world in the name of their religion, but that is the nature of the beast. Religions that don't kick arse sometimes get stomped on by those religions which do. The Crusades for example were a time of great barbarity and much slaughter, but they didn't happen in a vacuum. Christendom tried to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims who had taken it by force. It was a particularly bloody period for the same reason the English and American civil wars and World War I were particularly bloody: the forces on each side were large, well armed and well matched. The Muslims speak of atrocities and they are right to do so, but the Christians were fighting away from home, which always gives a side an advantage when it comes to the reputation for butchery of civilians. Just think about the story of the American West, there were atrocities on both sides because there could be, although as time went on the atrocities came to be more on one side than the other, as the Sioux and Comanches didn't really have the option of riding into Chicago or Boston and laying about the womenfolk of their foes until their horses were up to their bridles in blood. Likewise it was much easier for the Christians to slaughter Muslim women and children than vice versa, because the cream of Europe's chivalry left their womenfolk back in Europe. When Islam was spreading by the sword the Muslim hordes were also well in advance of their families. If you ever wonder whether advancing Muslim armies played by the Marquis of Queensbury rules you only need look to those parts of the world which are now Christian but were once Muslim. You'll find no love of Islam among Christians in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia and so on.
I want to say thank you to the Christians of Europe for what they have achieved. They have helped to create the greatest civilization and culture our species has ever seen. Of course we can say that Christianity held back material progress in Europe for about a thousand years but they did do some good things for our culture. Christianity helped create the modern western notion of the individual. Christianity always had a strong element of the individual in it from the earliest times. A thousand years of culture based around individual responsibility and accountability helped create the culture we have today. Only a fool could suggest that the Japanese are not smart enough to be great innovators, but somehow something is lacking there even now. It is no coincidence that the industrial revolution started among Northern European Protestants and people of that mind-set and continues to fizz at its strongest among societies that have completely accepted those values. Today you no longer have to believe in God to believe in Western Values of individualism and personal responsibility. Christian values and ways of thinking have grown bigger than the small-minded superstitions which formed them. You don't have to be Christian, or Northern European or white to hold these values. Just as you don't have to be a Hindu to value yoga and meditation you don't have to be a Protestant to value individualism and the work ethic.
I see many atheists rejecting those parts of religion that they don't like while clinging on to the aspects that they do approve of. Some atheists are just the shallow hedonists that Christians characterize so often. They see atheism as a way to flout rules they don't like. I find it very difficult to see this as being anything to be proud of. Atheism to them means never having to put your bong down. Other atheists see it as being vitally important to their identity to be homosexual. It certainly is not why I am an atheist, and I'd be a lot happier if the gay atheists got their head around the idea that most atheists are straight and that atheist is not the opposite of homophobic. Indeed it is perfectly possible to be an atheist and a homophobic bigot, or thoroughly cool about all forms of sexuality and a Christian. It's not all the same struggle thanks very much.
If you are an atheist I ask you to get yourself some perspective, stop regarding Christianity and Christians as the enemy. What we must watch out for is theocracy, the rule of societies and states by the supposed will of gods. Also we need to defend ourselves from those who attack us because of our belifiefs, or lack of beliefs. This is all about politics, secular, democratic, liberal politics which is not in any sense the opposite of modern Christianity.
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