The Huffington Post: 6 Things Christians Should Stop Saying To People Who Doubt

According to the center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study, about 34 percent of American adults have participated in religious switching, meaning their current religious identity is different from the one in which they were raised.

As a whole, Christianity loses more followers than it gains through religious switching. Although 85.6 percent of American adults say they were raised as Christians, more than a fifth of that group (19.2 percent of all U.S. adults), no longer identify with Christianity. The exception to this trend is evangelical Protestantism, which actually gains more adherents through switching than it loses.  [...]

For some of my friends and family, religious identity is a matter of heaven or hell. When your religion has such stark eternal consequences, it makes sense that when you see a loved one doubting, your instinct is to find a way to bring that person back into the fold as quickly as possible. But to achieve that goal, perfectly well-meaning Christians sometimes do more harm than good ― even though they may not be aware of it. [...]

At first glance, phrases like these appear to give people permission to doubt. In reality, it’s only permission to doubt in a certain way, within a specific set of boundaries. Telling someone that they can “doubt but not deny” reveals an inability to step outside of your own worldview and into a space where the very existence of God is up for debate. 

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CityLab: Would Germany Be Wealthier if Berlin Didn't Exist?

Before we look at why Germany’s figures skew differently, it’s worth looking more fully at the figures the report provides. They don’t, for instance, actually suggest any inherent relation between the size of a capital’s contribution to national GDP and the overall prosperity of a country. Of all capitals surveyed, it’s actually Athens that shows the greatest national dominance. If that city and its habitants were removed from national figures, then Greece’s GDP per capita would drop by 19.9 percent. The Paris region shows similar levels of national contribution: its absence would slash French per capita GDP by 15 percent. In the U.K., no London would mean a drop of 11.2 percent in per capita GDP. A Madrid-free Spain’s per capita GDP would drop by 6 percent, while even Rome—known for playing second fiddle to the economic powerhouse of the North Italian Plain—would cause Italy’s per capita GDP to drop 2.1 percent if it were removed from the country’s economy.

It’s only in Berlin that these figures appear to suggest Germany would actually be better off without it. Removing Berlin and its residents from German economic tallies would, according to the report, actually boost the country’s per capita GDP, albeit by a meager 0.2 percent. [...]

Does all that mean the city is failing to pull its weight? Not necessarily. While the cost of running Germany’s Berlin-based government are high, so are the benefits that effective government reaps—they just happen to be reaped elsewhere in Germany rather than in the city itself. Having a capital evenly split between the former eastern and western sectors has been invaluable in making reunification smoother, while Berlin’s boost to its country’s international prestige is huge. Without Berlin, Germany would likely be damned outside its borders as a boring, conservative place, a broad-brush stereotype that’s still not entirely without foundation. The rest of Germany may be contributing to keeping Berlin afloat rather than vice versa, but when you think about it, they’re still getting a pretty good deal.

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CityLab: It Could Take 2 Centuries For Racial Wealth Disparities to Dissipate

That’s according to a new report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development and Institute for Policy Studies, which estimates future wealth disparities among U.S racial groups using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF). The total amount of money in the average person’s pockets, or their net worth, is obtained by adding up assets like housing, bank deposits, financial securities, insurance plan values, stocks and mutual funds, and equity, and then from that sum, subtracting liabilities like mortgage, consumer, and educational debts. (This measure is based on a 2014 working paper by New York University economist Edward N. Wolff, and doesn’t take into account the value of goods like cars, electronics, and furniture.)

Using that methodology, the authors calculated the net worth of racial groups for 30 years before 2013, and then projected those trends into the future. They found that the economic rift between whites and minorities is widening dramatically: By 2043, when people of color overtake whites as the majority in the U.S. population, blacks and Latinos will likely lag even further behind them, wealth-wise, than they do now. These two minority groups will have around $1 million less than whites, on average, compared to $500,000 in 2013. [...]

If average Black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take Black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth White families [had in 2013]. That’s just 17 years shorter than the 245-year span of slavery in this country. For the average Latino family, it would take 84 years to amass the same amount of wealth White families [had in 2013]—that’s the year 2097.

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The Washington Post: Seas aren’t just rising, scientists say — it’s worse than that. They’re speeding up.

However, scientists have long expected that the story should be even worse than this. Predictions suggest that seas should not only rise, but that the rise should accelerate, meaning that the annual rate of rise should itself increase over time. That’s because the great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, should lose more and more mass, and the heat in the ocean should also increase.

The problem, or even mystery, is that scientists haven’t seen an unambiguous acceleration of sea level rise in a data record that’s considered the best for observing the problem — the one that began with the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite, which launched in late 1992 and carried an instrument, called a radar altimeter, that gives a very precise measurement of sea level around the globe. (It has since been succeeded by other satellites providing similar measurements.) [...]

In a new study in the open-access journal Scientific Reports, however, Fasullo and two colleagues say they have now resolved this problem. It turns out, they say, that sea level rise was artificially masked in the satellite record by the fact that one year before the satellite launched, the Earth experienced a major cooling pulse.

The cause? The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which filled the planet’s stratosphere with aerosols that reflected sunlight away from the Earth and actually led to a slight sea level fall in ensuing years as the ocean temporarily cooled.

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The Atlantic: How the Baltimore Police Department Abuses African Americans

The document lays out, in often sickening detail, the many ways Baltimore police abused the law, the people they were meant to serve, the public trust, and their own brothers in arms. In the wake of the failed prosecution of six officers for the death of Freddie Gray, the report serves as a reminder that rather than an isolated crime, the Gray case was symptomatic of a force that regularly arrested people for insufficient reasons, or no reasons at all, and used excessive force against them—but particularly, and uniquely, black citizens of the city. The Justice Department makes clear that African Americans in Baltimore were targeted and abused by the police, making this report a twin to the department’s report on Ferguson, Missouri, which my colleague Conor Friedersdorf wrote indicated a “conspiracy against black citizens.” [...]

Baltimore police routinely trample on First Amendment rights, arresting “members of the public for engaging in speech the officers perceive to be critical or disrespectful.” Supervisors have encouraged “facially unconstitutional” arrests for trespassing. One shift commander emailed a template for such arrests to officers and a sergeant. [...]

Other charges seem to be reserved entirely for African Americans. Of 657 people arrested for “gaming” or playing “cards or dice,” 99 percent were black. The report drily comments, “Although we are not aware of any data tracking the precise rate at which people of different races play cards or dice, it is extremely unlikely that African Americans comprise 99 percent of those doing so.” [...]

“BPD discourages members of the public from filing complaints against officers through the procedural requirements BPD has imposed on filing complaints, and BPD officers and supervisors have actively discouraged community members from filing complaints,” the report states. If people do make it over those hurdles, “BPD investigators frequently misclassify those complaints or administratively close them with little attempt to contact the complainant.”

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