Political Tilt of Atheists

Quite interesting. This seems very accurate. What is the word for this? Centralized, or undecided?

I don't think that Jesus was an advocate of socialism (or any political or economic movement born well after his time), what I am saying is that it seems that the more left leaning - even extreme left leaning (though not liberal) - political and economic views seem to me to be closer to what the Bible describes Jesus as advocating. Though it certainly is not a perfect fit, I see the sort of conservative capitalism advocated by many fundamentalists as something very difficult to square with the teachings of Jesus.

For the record, I don't believe Jesus would have stood up against the Romans for the simple reason that he was, at his time, a pretty insignificant figure, one apocalyptic god-man among many, who, for all his other pretentions, must have understood that he'd have a snowball's chance in hell of taking on an empire. Besides, it seems to me that Jesus - like early Christians - believed that he was living the end-times, and as such, worldly powers were to be short lived anyway.

It's usually a coalition between The Left Party and The Social Democrats, but next time it will include The Enviromental Party too. Right now there's a four party coalition of the rightwing factions wich leads to, as you described, that almost no one gets their will through, except the biggest one (The Moderates) and the smallest one (The Christian Democrats). The coalitions are usually about 51-55% of the voters.

The most confusing government was between 73-76 where the leftwings and the rightwings had exactly 150 mandates each... Sometimes you just have to love the government. Have your country experienced it?

In Holland we have 150 seats in the house of representatives. A majority (76 or more) can form a coalition government. So if you have party A with 41 seats, party B with 33 seats and party C with 6 seats they cam form a coalition and if they agree to do so, they can fill in the government.

What I meant was that while about 30% of the seats in the house of representatives are in the hands of christian parties, almost all of those seats are part of the coalition government.

I think in the USA there is a district system in which whoever has the most votes in a district gets all the seats (or votes) from that district. Over here, the amount of seats is just based on the overall total vote.

@hd_thoreau: Undecided seems resonable, but I think "Prey" is the political correct term ;).

@Stegocephalian:

"I see the sort of conservative capitalism advocated by many fundamentalists as something very difficult to square with the teachings of Jesus." I agree with you to a certain extent, but it seems like we are drifting further and further away from the main topic so I am going to drop it here.

My theory is that there are many conservative atheists, but that conservatives in general believe in the usefulness of myths to social order, and therefore tend to support christianity (or whatever the local religion is) even if they don't believe it.

Theory 2: The association between socialism and atheism is a historical accident following Marx and the fact that socialists wanted to change the social order and the churches wanted to preserve it. Had the churches embraced socialism when it came along, we would see the opposite effect today. And this could have happened, and there are longstanding christian socialist traditions, particularly among non-conformists.

Once established, correlations like this are self-reinforcing. People who come to a view on religion will be influenced in politics by their co-religionists. Similarly those who come to a view on politics will be influenced in religion in the same way.

I'm socially very very left, and economically only slightly left. A big hi to people I know from the open discussion group who I've seen here, and thanks to Stegocephalian for inviting me here :)

SchuBomb - wellcome, and glad to see you joined!