A BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE ON LOTTERIES AND GAMBLING

12 Reasons to Oppose the Lottery

1.       The Bible says that God is sufficient to meet our needs, and we are to trust in God.  The premise behind a lottery is that God is not sufficient to meet our needs.  Participating in the lottery takes chances with the money God gave us and relies on luck to take care of our future.

2.       The proposed Tennessee lottery is a new entitlement program for college scholarships. It constitutionally won’t add a penny to TennCare, the budget crisis, K-12 teacher’s salaries, K-12 school supplies, or law enforcement.

3.       The lottery won’t keep us from having higher taxes.  The lottery proposal constitutionally restricts the funds to a new scholarship program, with any possible excess restricted to school building programs and pre-kindergarten programs.  Comparing an income tax to the lottery compares apples to freight trains.  Forms of taxation such as the sales tax, property taxes, additional taxes on services, and income taxes address the general budget.  The lottery proceeds are constitutionally prohibited by the wording of the resolution from addressing the general budget.  It is a false issue to say I’d rather have the lottery than an income tax.   The funds go to entirely different areas, with the lottery being for a new program, and the tax proposals addressing the “budget crisis”.

4.       Lottery changes the values of a state from a work ethic to a chance ethic.  Do our children need any more ethical foundations destroyed for them?

5.        The state becomes a bookie in a state-run numbers game.  Government is ordained by God and should not be promoting vice.

6.       Illegal numbers games continue to flourish, even with state-run numbers games (lotteries).  Gamblers are lured into gambling with state- sponsored lottery advertisements, get addicted, and must rely on illegal bookie- lotteries where they can obtain loans to obtain the money to feed their gambling addiction.

7.       The state gets in the business of deceiving people (called fraud in any other business) by constantly promoting the get-rich-quick opportunities of lotteries.  The chances of winning the lottery are the same as getting struck by lightning 7 times.   Is it a proper role of God-ordained government to make losers of its citizens through false advertising?

8.       Lotteries exploit the poor.  Analyses of lottery ticket sales by zip code, state by state, show that lottery outlets are intentionally placed in low income neighborhoods.  In California, 4 out of 10 players are unemployed.  In Maryland, the poorest 1/3 of the people buy 2/3 of the daily lottery tickets.

9.       Children and youth respond to government’s lottery ads.  In Massachusetts, the Attorney General’s office found that 80% of minors had played the lottery. According to psychologist Dr. Durand Jacobs, where there is active promotion of state lotteries, there is increased participation in gambling among juveniles.  When any one form of gambling is promoted, participation in all forms of gambling is increased by juveniles. Gambling is rapidly overtaking alcohol usage as the leading illegal activity among youth.

10.   Lottery ticket sales replace sales of food.  A grocery store chain in California stopped selling lottery tickets after selling them the first two years of the California lottery.  The reason they stopped?  In an audit of grocery sales and lottery ticket sales, for the two years they sold tickets, grocery sales dropped by the exact dollar amount of their lottery ticket sales.

11.   Lottery ticket sales divert sales from real goods and services.  Retail merchants in lottery states have been appalled that merchandise sales dropped with the addition of lottery tickets in their stores.

12.   In other forms of gambling, you have to make an effort to gamble.  With a state run numbers game, the lottery is every where you turn—in the grocery store, at the gas station, being advertised on your car radio and in your home on TV.  The director of the Maryland Council on Compulsive gambling blames the rise of new classes of gamblers—women and children—on the lottery, saying, “Where it might be difficult for a 15-year old to get into a race track or onto a casino floor, he can walk into a convenience store and buy a handful of lottery tickets.”

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