Gambling

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Exodus 20:17

While I know in our culture gambling has become widely acceptable, I ask you to think about this...

Gambling is morally wrong.
Why?
Because nobody can win at gambling without somebody else losing.

Legitimate business is win/win. I sell - you buy - we both win. But in gambling for every winner, there are countless losers. You can’t bet a dollar and win a million dollars unless an awful lot of people bet dollars that in many cases they can’t afford to lose.

Gambling builds up false hope, a perversion of true hope. It promises happiness, but delivers disappointment and frustration. Therefore, gambling is profit and pleasure at the cost of somebody else’s pain and loss. It’s an attempt to get what belongs to someone else without giving him anything for it.

That fits any definition of stealing I can write.

If two people meet in an alley, and one points a gun at the other and takes his money, they call it “robbery.” But if two people meet in a casino, and one takes the other person’s money, they call it “gaming.” That sounds so much better than “gambling.”

Someone might object, “Wait a minute. There’s a big difference between a robbery and someone playing in a casino. The person in the alley is being robbed against his will, but no one’s forcing anyone to gamble.” The person in the casino is a willing participant. The fact that gambling is done willingly, doesn’t make it right.

A dual, for instance, is merely murder by mutual consent. Just because two people agree to shoot each other according to some silly set of rules, doesn’t give either one the right to take another’s life.