America Gambling Age
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*Holland America Gambling Age
*American Gambling Games
*American Gambling Age
*Legal gambling ages across the US vary, with states setting the minimum age at either 18 or 21. This can however change depending on the type of gambling, as well as if you’re playing in a Native.
*Minimum Age to Gamble in United States of America Below you will find the minimum legal age to gamble in various locations around the U.S., Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. In the 50 American states, some times you’ll see a variance, this usually is due to Indian casinos having different age requirements in their casinos than state regulated.
Gambling addiction statistics show people between the ages 20 and 30 have the highest rates of problem gambling. 75 percent of college students report having gambled during the past year The risk of developing a gambling addiction more than doubles for young adults in college settings. Legal Gambling Age In The United States. Adhering to the legal gambling age in your state is vital, both in legal online gambling in the United States and land based gambling. Due to the nature of state’s rights, each state can have its own age requirements pertaining to gambling. The gambling age of Egypt is 18 years of age, although a few of the casinos require players to be at least 21 years old. Gambling Age In Other Muslim Countries. As mentioned earlier, other Muslim countries strictly prohibit gambling. Anyone caught trying to gamble can face very severe consequences.
Article ID: DE209 | By: Rex M. Rogers
Summary
If baseball once was America’s national pastime, it’s been replaced by a $550 billion-per-year obsession — gambling. Gambling feeds the self-indulgent, instant-gratification mindset that has plagued America in recent decades. Beneath its glittery surface lurk the parallel tragedies of increasing addiction and a decreasing devotion to spirituality. Most Christian churches have been silent about gambling. Scripture is not. Even without a direct commandment, “Thou shalt not gamble,” the Bible offers numerous principles that militate against the practice. Informed Christians will challenge such social evils as state-sponsored gambling and the use of gambling for fundraising. Gambling is a bankrupt abandonment of reason and religion, and in the long run everyone loses.
Mark Twain shrewdly observed that “the best throw at dice is to throw them away.”1 Americans no longer agree. Gambling is the newest Great American Pastime.
State lotteries began in 1964 with New Hampshire, and now bring in $30 billion per year in 37 states and the District of Columbia.2 Some 55 million Americans play lotteries once per month, spending $88 million per day — more than they spend per day on groceries.3
What began as a trickle with state lotteries became a flash flood in 1988 when Native American tribes began taking advantage of the Federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which permitted them to operate casinos on tribal lands. Nearly 300 Indian-run casinos now exist in 28 states with 186 of the 557 federally recognized tribes participating. About 30 casinos are opening per year,4 and additional tribes are vying for a stake in what some have called “the new buffalo.”5
Gambling expenditures now top $550 billion per year.6 That’s more money than Americans spend per year on films, books, amusements, and music entertainment combined. It’s about $1.5 billion per day or an increase of roughly 3,000 percent in the past 20 years.7
With the exception of horse and dog racing, gambling is increasing in every form. Riverboat, dockside, and other off-shore gambling enterprises, including cruise ships, are being proposed in several states as “limited” gambling.
Off-track, parimutuel, jai alai, keno, and video betting are also increasing. So are raffles and bingo. Business Week observed that gambling outlets are becoming “almost ubiquitous” as “mob-affiliated bookies and numbers runners are being supplanted by state governments, charitable and religious groups, and blue-chip entertainment-leisure conglomerates that say they’re in the ‘gaming’ business.”8
THE VICE OF CHOICE
Some 95 percent of American citizens have gambled at some time in their lives. About 82 percent have played the lottery, 75 percent have played slot machines, 50 percent have bet on horse or dog races, 44 percent have gambled with cards, and 34 percent gamble via bingo. Approximately 26 percent have bet on sports events. About 74 percent of the American adult population have gambled in casinos. Polls indicate that at least 89 percent of the American population approves of casino gambling.9
The acceptance of gambling into everyday life is a historic shift in cultural philosophy. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor William N. Thompson observed that “the era of expanded legalized gambling has coincided with a trend toward increased permissiveness in society. There certainly is a connection between attitudes about lifestyle, sex, pornography — even abortion and occasional drug use — and attitudes toward gambling. The notion that government has no business in our bedrooms relates to the notion that government has no business telling us how to spend our leisure time and our own money as long as we are doing so without coercion or harm to others.”10
The ethic of self-denial, saving, and capital accumulation is being replaced with a hedonistic consumerism, what Christopher Lasch called the “culture of narcissism.”11 Deferred gratification is shelved in favor of instant demand. Americans want more, and they want it now.
Many Americans no longer work for future earthly or spiritual rewards. They only consume and receive less and less satisfaction from it.12
The philosophy of gambling undercuts one’s ability and desire to defer gratification in order to accomplish a goal. Individual enterprise, thrift, effort, and self-denial are set aside for chance gain, immediate satisfaction, and self-indulgence. In this sense, gambling exemplifies a reversal of American values.13
THIRD TIME’S A CHARM?
Whittier Law School gambling expert I. Nelson Rose believes a third wave of legalized gambling is washing over the United States.14 The first wave began in colonial America when lottery management companies took their place among the largest early-nineteenth-century businesses.15 A healthy economy together with lottery corruption contributed to the decline of legal lotteries by the 1820s.
The second wave of legal gambling began when Southern states looked for revenue after the Civil War. Gambling was a major diversion in late-nineteenth-century Western gold and silver mining camps. Legalized gambling’s second wave of popularity began losing strength in the 1880s with the Louisiana State Lottery scandal (in which local lottery fundraisers evolved into mail fraud and criminal interstate commerce involving corrupt government officials, intrigue, and murder). By 1894, state lotteries were condemned by law, and 36 states adopted antilottery text in their state constitutions.16
While gambling has been legal in (and largely limited to) Nevada since 1931, the third wave of legalized gambling in the United States began in 1964 with the inception of the New Hampshire State Lottery. By 1984, a majority of states had legalized lotteries.17
Bingo was legalized in 1937 in Rhode Island. Some 46 states, the District of Columbia, and all the Canadian provinces now have legalized bingo.18
Horse race betting is legal in 42 states and all Canadian provinces, dog race betting in 19 states, and jai alai games in four states. All 10 Canadian provinces and 48 American states now permit some form of legal gambling. By the year 2000, some experts have predicted that 40 percent of U.S. households will be participating in legalized commerical gambling.19
Legalized commercial gambling is now growing at breakneck speed, spurred by cash–hungry governments, gambling industry promotion of “gaming” as entertainment, and the appeal of new, high-tech video gambling. Some antigambling counselors believe that “decades of church–sponsored gambling [have] also tended to lend approval to games of chance.”20
Only two states still maintain a no-legal-gambling policy: Hawaii and Utah. Hawaii debates the matter periodically. While 60 percent of Hawaiians polled favor a lottery, enough citizens are concerned about damaging the state’s image as an island paradise that lotteries and other commercial gambling are consistently rejected.21
Eugene Martin Christiansen, a gambling industry consultant, believes America’s new love affair with gambling “is part of a fundamental change that is irreversible at this point because the country is changing with fewer people going to church, more older people with time and money on their hands, and especially, with state lottery advertising campaigns that make it seem that buying lottery tickets is almost a patriotic duty.”22
LOSING THE BET
Gambling is a spiritual and financial timebomb in a pretty package, and no demographic group is immune to the social pathologies associated with it.23 Compulsive gambling is increasing rapidly in all population groups, even among teens.
The fastest growing “addiction” among high school and college-age young people is problem gambling, with as much as seven percent or 1.3 million teens considered addicted. Dr. Durand Jacobs, a pioneer in the treatment of problem gambling, believes the rate among teens is at least 10 percent, about twice the rate among adults.24
Howard Schaffer, director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Addiction Studies, predicted, “We will face in the next decade or so more problems with youth gambling than we’ll face with drug use.”25 The National Institute of Mental Health notes that “addiction” to gambling is growing fastest among teenagers.26 Suicide rates are twice as high among teenagers with gambling problems,27 and teenagers are nearly two-and-one-half times as likely as adults to become compulsive gamblers.28
Durand Jacobs noted that “public understanding of gambling is where our understanding of alcoholism was some 40 or 50 years ago. Unless we wake up soon to gambling’s darker side, we’re going to have a whole new generation lost to this addiction.”29
From lotteries in the 1960s to casinos in the 1990s, the gambling industry has grown more rapidly and more explosively than any business in American history. Legalized commercial gambling is now one of the largest industries in the U.S. leisure economy.30
IT’S NOT IN THE CARDS
While the tidal wave of legalized commercial gambling has engulfed the country, the Christian community has greeted this development with a deafening silence. A few local battles have taken place, and during the past two years, Christian leaders such as Gary Bauer, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Ralph Reed have begun to speak out, but so far gambling has garnered very little national attention.
Several reasons may explain why Christians have been rather slow to respond to the spread of legalized commercial gambling:
1.) The conservative Christian “agenda” is packed, focusing on issues like abortion, pornography, crime, gun control, sex education, creationism, “family values,” and prayer in public schools.
2. Conservative Christians, particularly those who call themselves fundamentalists, have been historically reticent to “get involved in politics.”Holland America Gambling Age
3.There are no direct biblical commands declaring gambling a sin. And unlike narcotics, which exercise an immediate negative impact upon the user, the harmful effects of habitual gambling take longer to reveal themselves. Moral arguments against gambling are, therefore, more difficult to develop. In a recent survey, George Barna found that only 28 percent of “born again” Christians believe casinos should be illegal in the United States.31
4.) Christians are just as materialistic as everyone else. The lure of quick riches entices Christians to gamble too.
For these reasons as well as others, theological disapproval does not always translate to social or political opposition. Christians seem to be just as uninformed and unconcerned as everyone else.
THUS SAITH THE LORD
There is no “Eleventh Commandment” in the Bible saying “Thou shalt not gamble.” However, gambling violates at least five doctrines of Scripture: the sovereignty of God, stewardship, covetousness, brotherly love, and God’s instruction not to be brought under the power of anything.
Sovereignty of God
Belief in luck and belief in a sovereign God are mutually exclusive, for if an omniscient, omnipotent Creator God exists then luck makes no sense. Things don’t “just happen.” Nothing — including the secondary causes operative in the universe (the “laws” of nature and human choices) — happens outside of God’s will and disposition. So belief in God not only dispells any idea of luck, it also rejects any idea of chance as a determining factor in natural events or people’s destiny. “Depending upon luck and chance is a philosophy which deifies an impersonal view of life and of reality.”32 Any trust in luck rather than God is therefore a form of idolatry.
What appears to be chance to the finite human mind is known to a sovereign God. Casting of lots, for example, is a biblical illustration not of gambling (for no money or other value was placed at risk in hopes of greater gain) but of individuals trusting a sovereign God to direct the “chance” disposition or direction of the lay of the lots. 6 slot 4x6 picture frame size. People used “chance” to understand God’s will. Their faith was not in chance but in God. But belief in chance as fate stands in direct opposition to a purposeful creation, ordered and directed by the Sovereign God of the universe. Chance without God is the personification of anarchy and nihilism. God controls, not chance (Amos 3:6).33
The idea that events are ultimately disposed merely by chance is akin to superstition. Pagan superstition is a violation of God’s will. Worshipping the gods of luck and chance is an offense to His character. Gambling is a kind of “secularized divination.”34 It promotes a world view in direct contradiction to biblical Christianity.
Stewardship
God says in Proverbs that “he who works his land will have abundant food, but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment” (12:11). People often chase fantasies, yielding to the lure of quick riches, the “something-for-nothing” enchantment. But God gives people time, talent, and treasure with an expectation of accountability (Matt. 25:14–30). The Bible teaches that we are to use our God–given wealth to support our families, God’s work, the government, and the needy.
Gambling can undermine the foundations of Christian stewardship — work, rationality, and responsibility. But work is both a command and a gift of God (2 Thess. 3:6–12). And reason is an essential part of being human. “Irresponsibility is man’s abdication of his humanity. We are made to be moral decision-making creatures.”35
Covetousness
Gambling feeds covetousness, the opposite of God’s call for contentment (Phil. 4:11–12). It masquerades as harmless fun while it eventually sucks the dollars and sometimes the life out of those who embrace it (1 Tim. 6:6–10). The basis of all antigambling legislation is the necessity of curbing or controlling covetousness, the very natural and selfish desire to get something for nothing.36
Love Thy Neighbor
Gambling creates a condition in which one person’s gain is necessarily many other persons’ loss. As such, gambling militates against brotherly love, justice, and mercy (Matt. 22:37–40; Mic. 6:8).
Gambling substitutes love of self or love of money for love of neighbor (Rom. 14:21; 15:1; 1 Tim. 6:6–10). Martin Luther said that “money won by gambling is not without self seeking and love of self is not without sin.”37 Gambling, unlike legitimate business practices wherein both parties gain, creates a condition in which individuals are willingly duped of their resources in a something-for-nothing exchange.
To take from one’s neighbor in an unfair exchange is not love, to set up a system in which those least able to afford it lose their livelihood is not justice, and to continue operating a system that exploits human weakness while promoting personal pleasure and profit over others’ pain and loss is not mercy. While it is true that the legitimate marketplace can operate without regard for the Christian value of love of neighbor, this is not an essential and unavoidable character of business. In gambling, love of neighbor is not only impossible, it is systematically suppressed.
Mastery of the Will
Gambling is potentially habitual, what Pascal called a “fatal fascination,” like a moth’s fascination for the candle.38 Some even label the problem an addiction. Yet God makes it clear in His Word that Christians are not to allow their minds or bodies to be mastered by anything other than the Holy Spirit of God (1 Cor. 6:12). Anything else leads to idolatry.
The Bible’s doctrines pertaining to the use of money indicate that morality and money are not mutually exclusive. God reveals the former so that mankind will know how to use the latter. Too often, though, people want the money without the morality.
Since governments are comprised of people, it should come as no surprise that they want money without morality too. In gambling, that’s exactly what they’ve got.
GOVERNMENT’S GOLDEN GOOSE
Governments are looking for easy money, so they sell their souls for a promise of riches. Whether government should enhance its revenues with gambling monies — the losses of its citizens — is a moral question, not just an economic one, no matter why people gamble. So far, except for a few scattered antigambling victories, money has bested morality in most contests for legislative hearts.
State government-sponsored gambling turns state government into a huckster. And legalization is followed by legitimation. Gambling is being socially legitimized by virtue of its governmental sanction. A one-time social evil is being transformed into acceptable social policy.
Governments facing budget deficits and antitax sentiment see gambling revenues as a painless panacea. States promote gambling, then use the revenues as a supplementary, “voluntary” tax. Gambling interests sell commercial gambling as a way of salvaging Rust Belt industrial cities.39 Then they lure legislators and voters by associating gambling with some noble purpose like public education or better roads. Such arguments provide a politically palatable “moral justification” that helps dilute or mute opposition to gambling.
In practice, however, state legislatures time and again have refused to stick to promises of earmarked funds. Instead they let gambling revenues pay for promised public works and use general funds for other purposes. Gambling revenues become just another part of the state’s giant budgetary pie.40
In the United States, gambling operations vigorously promote their games, and states are counted a
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*Holland America Gambling Age
*American Gambling Games
*American Gambling Age
*Legal gambling ages across the US vary, with states setting the minimum age at either 18 or 21. This can however change depending on the type of gambling, as well as if you’re playing in a Native.
*Minimum Age to Gamble in United States of America Below you will find the minimum legal age to gamble in various locations around the U.S., Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. In the 50 American states, some times you’ll see a variance, this usually is due to Indian casinos having different age requirements in their casinos than state regulated.
Gambling addiction statistics show people between the ages 20 and 30 have the highest rates of problem gambling. 75 percent of college students report having gambled during the past year The risk of developing a gambling addiction more than doubles for young adults in college settings. Legal Gambling Age In The United States. Adhering to the legal gambling age in your state is vital, both in legal online gambling in the United States and land based gambling. Due to the nature of state’s rights, each state can have its own age requirements pertaining to gambling. The gambling age of Egypt is 18 years of age, although a few of the casinos require players to be at least 21 years old. Gambling Age In Other Muslim Countries. As mentioned earlier, other Muslim countries strictly prohibit gambling. Anyone caught trying to gamble can face very severe consequences.
Article ID: DE209 | By: Rex M. Rogers
Summary
If baseball once was America’s national pastime, it’s been replaced by a $550 billion-per-year obsession — gambling. Gambling feeds the self-indulgent, instant-gratification mindset that has plagued America in recent decades. Beneath its glittery surface lurk the parallel tragedies of increasing addiction and a decreasing devotion to spirituality. Most Christian churches have been silent about gambling. Scripture is not. Even without a direct commandment, “Thou shalt not gamble,” the Bible offers numerous principles that militate against the practice. Informed Christians will challenge such social evils as state-sponsored gambling and the use of gambling for fundraising. Gambling is a bankrupt abandonment of reason and religion, and in the long run everyone loses.
Mark Twain shrewdly observed that “the best throw at dice is to throw them away.”1 Americans no longer agree. Gambling is the newest Great American Pastime.
State lotteries began in 1964 with New Hampshire, and now bring in $30 billion per year in 37 states and the District of Columbia.2 Some 55 million Americans play lotteries once per month, spending $88 million per day — more than they spend per day on groceries.3
What began as a trickle with state lotteries became a flash flood in 1988 when Native American tribes began taking advantage of the Federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which permitted them to operate casinos on tribal lands. Nearly 300 Indian-run casinos now exist in 28 states with 186 of the 557 federally recognized tribes participating. About 30 casinos are opening per year,4 and additional tribes are vying for a stake in what some have called “the new buffalo.”5
Gambling expenditures now top $550 billion per year.6 That’s more money than Americans spend per year on films, books, amusements, and music entertainment combined. It’s about $1.5 billion per day or an increase of roughly 3,000 percent in the past 20 years.7
With the exception of horse and dog racing, gambling is increasing in every form. Riverboat, dockside, and other off-shore gambling enterprises, including cruise ships, are being proposed in several states as “limited” gambling.
Off-track, parimutuel, jai alai, keno, and video betting are also increasing. So are raffles and bingo. Business Week observed that gambling outlets are becoming “almost ubiquitous” as “mob-affiliated bookies and numbers runners are being supplanted by state governments, charitable and religious groups, and blue-chip entertainment-leisure conglomerates that say they’re in the ‘gaming’ business.”8
THE VICE OF CHOICE
Some 95 percent of American citizens have gambled at some time in their lives. About 82 percent have played the lottery, 75 percent have played slot machines, 50 percent have bet on horse or dog races, 44 percent have gambled with cards, and 34 percent gamble via bingo. Approximately 26 percent have bet on sports events. About 74 percent of the American adult population have gambled in casinos. Polls indicate that at least 89 percent of the American population approves of casino gambling.9
The acceptance of gambling into everyday life is a historic shift in cultural philosophy. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor William N. Thompson observed that “the era of expanded legalized gambling has coincided with a trend toward increased permissiveness in society. There certainly is a connection between attitudes about lifestyle, sex, pornography — even abortion and occasional drug use — and attitudes toward gambling. The notion that government has no business in our bedrooms relates to the notion that government has no business telling us how to spend our leisure time and our own money as long as we are doing so without coercion or harm to others.”10
The ethic of self-denial, saving, and capital accumulation is being replaced with a hedonistic consumerism, what Christopher Lasch called the “culture of narcissism.”11 Deferred gratification is shelved in favor of instant demand. Americans want more, and they want it now.
Many Americans no longer work for future earthly or spiritual rewards. They only consume and receive less and less satisfaction from it.12
The philosophy of gambling undercuts one’s ability and desire to defer gratification in order to accomplish a goal. Individual enterprise, thrift, effort, and self-denial are set aside for chance gain, immediate satisfaction, and self-indulgence. In this sense, gambling exemplifies a reversal of American values.13
THIRD TIME’S A CHARM?
Whittier Law School gambling expert I. Nelson Rose believes a third wave of legalized gambling is washing over the United States.14 The first wave began in colonial America when lottery management companies took their place among the largest early-nineteenth-century businesses.15 A healthy economy together with lottery corruption contributed to the decline of legal lotteries by the 1820s.
The second wave of legal gambling began when Southern states looked for revenue after the Civil War. Gambling was a major diversion in late-nineteenth-century Western gold and silver mining camps. Legalized gambling’s second wave of popularity began losing strength in the 1880s with the Louisiana State Lottery scandal (in which local lottery fundraisers evolved into mail fraud and criminal interstate commerce involving corrupt government officials, intrigue, and murder). By 1894, state lotteries were condemned by law, and 36 states adopted antilottery text in their state constitutions.16
While gambling has been legal in (and largely limited to) Nevada since 1931, the third wave of legalized gambling in the United States began in 1964 with the inception of the New Hampshire State Lottery. By 1984, a majority of states had legalized lotteries.17
Bingo was legalized in 1937 in Rhode Island. Some 46 states, the District of Columbia, and all the Canadian provinces now have legalized bingo.18
Horse race betting is legal in 42 states and all Canadian provinces, dog race betting in 19 states, and jai alai games in four states. All 10 Canadian provinces and 48 American states now permit some form of legal gambling. By the year 2000, some experts have predicted that 40 percent of U.S. households will be participating in legalized commerical gambling.19
Legalized commercial gambling is now growing at breakneck speed, spurred by cash–hungry governments, gambling industry promotion of “gaming” as entertainment, and the appeal of new, high-tech video gambling. Some antigambling counselors believe that “decades of church–sponsored gambling [have] also tended to lend approval to games of chance.”20
Only two states still maintain a no-legal-gambling policy: Hawaii and Utah. Hawaii debates the matter periodically. While 60 percent of Hawaiians polled favor a lottery, enough citizens are concerned about damaging the state’s image as an island paradise that lotteries and other commercial gambling are consistently rejected.21
Eugene Martin Christiansen, a gambling industry consultant, believes America’s new love affair with gambling “is part of a fundamental change that is irreversible at this point because the country is changing with fewer people going to church, more older people with time and money on their hands, and especially, with state lottery advertising campaigns that make it seem that buying lottery tickets is almost a patriotic duty.”22
LOSING THE BET
Gambling is a spiritual and financial timebomb in a pretty package, and no demographic group is immune to the social pathologies associated with it.23 Compulsive gambling is increasing rapidly in all population groups, even among teens.
The fastest growing “addiction” among high school and college-age young people is problem gambling, with as much as seven percent or 1.3 million teens considered addicted. Dr. Durand Jacobs, a pioneer in the treatment of problem gambling, believes the rate among teens is at least 10 percent, about twice the rate among adults.24
Howard Schaffer, director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Addiction Studies, predicted, “We will face in the next decade or so more problems with youth gambling than we’ll face with drug use.”25 The National Institute of Mental Health notes that “addiction” to gambling is growing fastest among teenagers.26 Suicide rates are twice as high among teenagers with gambling problems,27 and teenagers are nearly two-and-one-half times as likely as adults to become compulsive gamblers.28
Durand Jacobs noted that “public understanding of gambling is where our understanding of alcoholism was some 40 or 50 years ago. Unless we wake up soon to gambling’s darker side, we’re going to have a whole new generation lost to this addiction.”29
From lotteries in the 1960s to casinos in the 1990s, the gambling industry has grown more rapidly and more explosively than any business in American history. Legalized commercial gambling is now one of the largest industries in the U.S. leisure economy.30
IT’S NOT IN THE CARDS
While the tidal wave of legalized commercial gambling has engulfed the country, the Christian community has greeted this development with a deafening silence. A few local battles have taken place, and during the past two years, Christian leaders such as Gary Bauer, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Ralph Reed have begun to speak out, but so far gambling has garnered very little national attention.
Several reasons may explain why Christians have been rather slow to respond to the spread of legalized commercial gambling:
1.) The conservative Christian “agenda” is packed, focusing on issues like abortion, pornography, crime, gun control, sex education, creationism, “family values,” and prayer in public schools.
2. Conservative Christians, particularly those who call themselves fundamentalists, have been historically reticent to “get involved in politics.”Holland America Gambling Age
3.There are no direct biblical commands declaring gambling a sin. And unlike narcotics, which exercise an immediate negative impact upon the user, the harmful effects of habitual gambling take longer to reveal themselves. Moral arguments against gambling are, therefore, more difficult to develop. In a recent survey, George Barna found that only 28 percent of “born again” Christians believe casinos should be illegal in the United States.31
4.) Christians are just as materialistic as everyone else. The lure of quick riches entices Christians to gamble too.
For these reasons as well as others, theological disapproval does not always translate to social or political opposition. Christians seem to be just as uninformed and unconcerned as everyone else.
THUS SAITH THE LORD
There is no “Eleventh Commandment” in the Bible saying “Thou shalt not gamble.” However, gambling violates at least five doctrines of Scripture: the sovereignty of God, stewardship, covetousness, brotherly love, and God’s instruction not to be brought under the power of anything.
Sovereignty of God
Belief in luck and belief in a sovereign God are mutually exclusive, for if an omniscient, omnipotent Creator God exists then luck makes no sense. Things don’t “just happen.” Nothing — including the secondary causes operative in the universe (the “laws” of nature and human choices) — happens outside of God’s will and disposition. So belief in God not only dispells any idea of luck, it also rejects any idea of chance as a determining factor in natural events or people’s destiny. “Depending upon luck and chance is a philosophy which deifies an impersonal view of life and of reality.”32 Any trust in luck rather than God is therefore a form of idolatry.
What appears to be chance to the finite human mind is known to a sovereign God. Casting of lots, for example, is a biblical illustration not of gambling (for no money or other value was placed at risk in hopes of greater gain) but of individuals trusting a sovereign God to direct the “chance” disposition or direction of the lay of the lots. 6 slot 4x6 picture frame size. People used “chance” to understand God’s will. Their faith was not in chance but in God. But belief in chance as fate stands in direct opposition to a purposeful creation, ordered and directed by the Sovereign God of the universe. Chance without God is the personification of anarchy and nihilism. God controls, not chance (Amos 3:6).33
The idea that events are ultimately disposed merely by chance is akin to superstition. Pagan superstition is a violation of God’s will. Worshipping the gods of luck and chance is an offense to His character. Gambling is a kind of “secularized divination.”34 It promotes a world view in direct contradiction to biblical Christianity.
Stewardship
God says in Proverbs that “he who works his land will have abundant food, but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment” (12:11). People often chase fantasies, yielding to the lure of quick riches, the “something-for-nothing” enchantment. But God gives people time, talent, and treasure with an expectation of accountability (Matt. 25:14–30). The Bible teaches that we are to use our God–given wealth to support our families, God’s work, the government, and the needy.
Gambling can undermine the foundations of Christian stewardship — work, rationality, and responsibility. But work is both a command and a gift of God (2 Thess. 3:6–12). And reason is an essential part of being human. “Irresponsibility is man’s abdication of his humanity. We are made to be moral decision-making creatures.”35
Covetousness
Gambling feeds covetousness, the opposite of God’s call for contentment (Phil. 4:11–12). It masquerades as harmless fun while it eventually sucks the dollars and sometimes the life out of those who embrace it (1 Tim. 6:6–10). The basis of all antigambling legislation is the necessity of curbing or controlling covetousness, the very natural and selfish desire to get something for nothing.36
Love Thy Neighbor
Gambling creates a condition in which one person’s gain is necessarily many other persons’ loss. As such, gambling militates against brotherly love, justice, and mercy (Matt. 22:37–40; Mic. 6:8).
Gambling substitutes love of self or love of money for love of neighbor (Rom. 14:21; 15:1; 1 Tim. 6:6–10). Martin Luther said that “money won by gambling is not without self seeking and love of self is not without sin.”37 Gambling, unlike legitimate business practices wherein both parties gain, creates a condition in which individuals are willingly duped of their resources in a something-for-nothing exchange.
To take from one’s neighbor in an unfair exchange is not love, to set up a system in which those least able to afford it lose their livelihood is not justice, and to continue operating a system that exploits human weakness while promoting personal pleasure and profit over others’ pain and loss is not mercy. While it is true that the legitimate marketplace can operate without regard for the Christian value of love of neighbor, this is not an essential and unavoidable character of business. In gambling, love of neighbor is not only impossible, it is systematically suppressed.
Mastery of the Will
Gambling is potentially habitual, what Pascal called a “fatal fascination,” like a moth’s fascination for the candle.38 Some even label the problem an addiction. Yet God makes it clear in His Word that Christians are not to allow their minds or bodies to be mastered by anything other than the Holy Spirit of God (1 Cor. 6:12). Anything else leads to idolatry.
The Bible’s doctrines pertaining to the use of money indicate that morality and money are not mutually exclusive. God reveals the former so that mankind will know how to use the latter. Too often, though, people want the money without the morality.
Since governments are comprised of people, it should come as no surprise that they want money without morality too. In gambling, that’s exactly what they’ve got.
GOVERNMENT’S GOLDEN GOOSE
Governments are looking for easy money, so they sell their souls for a promise of riches. Whether government should enhance its revenues with gambling monies — the losses of its citizens — is a moral question, not just an economic one, no matter why people gamble. So far, except for a few scattered antigambling victories, money has bested morality in most contests for legislative hearts.
State government-sponsored gambling turns state government into a huckster. And legalization is followed by legitimation. Gambling is being socially legitimized by virtue of its governmental sanction. A one-time social evil is being transformed into acceptable social policy.
Governments facing budget deficits and antitax sentiment see gambling revenues as a painless panacea. States promote gambling, then use the revenues as a supplementary, “voluntary” tax. Gambling interests sell commercial gambling as a way of salvaging Rust Belt industrial cities.39 Then they lure legislators and voters by associating gambling with some noble purpose like public education or better roads. Such arguments provide a politically palatable “moral justification” that helps dilute or mute opposition to gambling.
In practice, however, state legislatures time and again have refused to stick to promises of earmarked funds. Instead they let gambling revenues pay for promised public works and use general funds for other purposes. Gambling revenues become just another part of the state’s giant budgetary pie.40
In the United States, gambling operations vigorously promote their games, and states are counted a
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