Joachim Kahl, German atheist

Joachim Kahl (1941- ) was once a theologian, once a Marxist, and is still a philosopher. Apparently he is no fan of Dawkins & co. One of his books has been translated into English: The Misery of Christianity, Or, A Plea for a Humanity without God, with a preface by Gerhard Szczesny, translated by N. D. Smith. (Penguin, 1971).

Here is one translated piece that can be found on the web:

The Answer of Atheism: "There Is No God" by Joachim Kahl, translated by Michaela Sommer.

There are various quotes from Kahl on various web pages. Here are a few quotes from The Misery of Christianity to be found in an article entitled If Christianity does not scandalize you, you do not know it!:

“The necessity to go on criticizing Christianity and theology is due to the simple fact that they continue to exist. The light of reason once more has to be directed against today's representatives of religion who have always benefited from the universal human trend to forget.”

“This book is a pamphlet . . . It cannot and does not want to conceal its polemic intentions. It was written due to a constant constraint of purification. I do not share the generally prevailing prejudice that rational criticism can only be presented in an undercooled and reserved manner. I have not written this work without anger and without study, but with anger and with study, with the ire developing of its own accord after a sufficient amount of thorough studies. If Christianity does not scandalize you, you do not know it!”

“The New Testament is a manifesto of inhumanity, a wide-ranging mass betrayal; it makes people dumb instead of enlightening them about their real interests.”

“The New Testament is the outcome of neurotic and narrow-minded people. Human sexuality is not seen as a source of pleasure, but as a source of fear, not as a medium of love, but as a medium of sin. Everything natural and bodily is banned – in part openly, in part hidden.”

Here is another quote from another web page:

“If have learnt a great deal from Franz Overbeck’s writings — so much that his personal fate terrifies me. At the end of his long period as Professor of Theology at Basle, he admitted: ‘I can honestly say that Christianity cost me my life. To such an extent that, although I never possessed it and only became a theologian as the result of a ‘misunderstanding’, I have taken my whole life to get rid of it.’ Does this situation have to be perpetuated? Christianity has already cheated too many people out of their lives. That is why I want to get rid of it, right away.” (p. 21)

Yet another quote, from the web site Bad News About Christianity:

The Ustaša, as this terrorist organisation was called, was responsible for the forcible conversion of some 240,000 Orthodox Serbs to Roman Catholicism and for putting about 750,000 of these people to death. There was, from the beginning, close collaboration between the Catholic clergy and the Ustaša. Archbishop Stepinać, whom the Vatican appointed in 1942 to be the spiritual leader of the Ustaša, had a place, together with ten of his clergy, in the Ustaša Parliament. Priests were also employed as police chiefs and as officers in the personal body-guard of the fanatical Croatian head of state, Pavelić. Nuns marched in military parades immediately behind the soldiers, their arms raised in the fascist salute. Abbesses were decorated with the Ustaša order. The most cruel part of this movement was played, however, by the Franciscans, whose monasteries had for some time been used as arsenals. Several monks and priests agreed to work as executioners in the hastily set up concentration camps to which the Orthodox Serbs were sent for mass execution by decapitation. These massacres were so brutal that even Croatia's allies, the German Nazis, protested against them and petitions were sent to the Vatican. Pope Pius XII, however, said nothing, just as he also said nothing about Auschwitz. It was not until some ten years later, in 1953, that he broke his silence by promoting Archbishop Stepinać, who, as one of those bearing the greatest guilt, had been sentenced by the Supreme People's Court of Yugoslavia to sixteen years" forced labour, to the rank of Cardinal for his "great services" to the Church.