Same. When I was in Texas a while back, I learned that - I THINK I have this right - the state government runs the state lottery, and profits from running the system go into the state’s coffers, same as state taxes. Which seems like a pretty fair way to do it…
There’s the “contributing to society” aspect that’s been mentioned, from a moral perspective. Although depending on what you’re buying stock in, you may be contributing more by buying the lotto ticket since those funds go to the government and are used for public programs and resources. Whereas buying stock you are bolstering the capital of a private company that may be wonderful for humanity or may be purely evil. Hard to make that judgement though.
My great unkle raised race horses. His pastor wanted him to make a donation to the church building fund. Around 1960 he made a donation of $10,000, he signed the check BanJo Joe his lead horse. figured the money was earned by the horse so the horse should sign the checks.
The pastor did not know what to do with the check until he went to a convention 6 months later. He brought the check up for discussion and what to do with it in a small group. Should he cash it or not. the advice he got was to cash it and any other check like it he could get.
MY take is if it controls you and you gamble the it is a sin. That is are you gambling with money you can not afford to lose, do you gamble for fun or because you have to.
It is like money. Money is not evil. The love of money is evil.
People who (successfully) gamble for a living put an unbelievable amount of work into it. Gambling successfully is every bit as difficult as almost any job you can name.
As far as contributing to society goes, i live in a country where the government has little accountability and hence spends just close to 30% of the total funds at its disposal on a project of public welfare and the rest goes into the pockets of the officials and ministers. So, betting(as i call it) on the stocks of a company is morally better in my opinion as private companies run most of the charitable institutions or are big donators to NGOs and the like here.
Now i dont know of a case where buying lotto tickets has wrecked a person’s life. What i have usually come across are cases in which people are hooked on to flash/poker and end up in huge debts or squander away their hard-earned money.
As my observation on gambling suggests, i think people do it as an urge to see the odds or check their luck, and i do it at times too just to see if the odds are in my favour. I also feel that gambling is very similar to real life as in real life too we do calculations and discover probabilities of our chances at succeeding. In gambling the gambler also has to make choices(and i am talking gambling requiring skill here like black-jack,poker etc) and can learn from his mistakes, know the weeknesses in his choices and be a better judge as he practices more. Now, what i am saying is that if a person does it moderately, it might actually be a good exercise and a learning experience. Objectively speaking i think gambling of certain types can be beneficial. Now, excess of anything and everything is bad and this anecdote applies to gambling in a very horrific manner as the sad stories tell and i feel that is from where this morality issue comes into the picture. Well, if that is the case, then even taking risks in business should be immoral coz sometimes its results are worse.
And as to panache45’s question that whether gambling is considerd a vice due to its associated illegal practices or per se, considered immoral, i think it is like alcohol. When alcohol was banned, organized crime took over as it was an opium of the masses, and so is gambling. This does not apply to the pushing of illegal drugs by organized crime as those things unlike alcohol or gambling, are mass killers and debilitators of whole nations.
Moved from General Questions to Great Debates.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
Women.
Women control religion, because traditionally they are the ones who teach it to their children. So naturally memes that are conducive to a good family life are going to survive longer. Just like nearly all religions condemn frittering away your money on whores, nearly all religions condemn spending your family’s food money on dice. A religion that didn’t wouldn’t survive because the women would start turning to something else when their husbands came home broke all the time.
Just as an objective fact, the odds are never in your favor (this pertains to instances where you are playing against a house). The most you can do with practice in games of skill (against a house) is slightly decrease the advantage the house has against you. In a game of skill against another player, it’s not really a question of odds; it’s a matter of who is playing with the superior skills.
Welcome to the SDMB, by the way. 
My understanding, having been raised a Southern Baptist, has always been that the reason gambling was considered a sin was that it was a “game of chance”. Some hard-core Baptists won’t even play cards or games with dice for the same reason. They see the element of random chance as somehow opposed to God’s teachings. (not sure WHY, but that’s the explanation I always heard. Maybe they consider Satan in charge of random chance, and/or think people should only put their trust in God, not chance.)
Some considered the Bingo games run by the Catholics as a form of sinful gambling, and it was certainly not a form of fundraising a Baptist church would engage in.
I’d wager the idea of making wagers has been around for as long as man has had a competitive nature and something to stake. If it can be deemed immoral, how much more immoral is its facillitation?
How do you go about setting up an independent turf accountants, and what qualifications would you need? What kind of initial finances would a person need? Do many of them go out of business? [/hijack]
When I play blackjack, I enjoy it. I may budget, say, $250 for the event. It’s very seldom that I lose it all; more likely is that I play four hours and lose, say, $80. Sometimes I win. But even in the rare event that I lose every penny, I’ve enjoyed the time spent playing.
Now, the opera. I enjoy the opera, and see most of the season in DC every year. That’s roughly $150 for me and my wife to go, plus dinner out, plus babysitting money if my mom isn’t available. At the end of that evening, I have never once won money – I have always lost every penny. But I have enjoyed the time spent.
So, with the obvious exception of Wagner, does anyone wish to argue that opera is evil?
Weren’t Jesus’s garments won in a dice game? That might be enough right there.
But I’d say it’s more likely that there are few ways to lose money as quickly as through gambling, and that money doesn’t go to a good that can be eaten or sold or exchanged. That means a member of a church might be slipping into poverty, which hurts that member, that member’s family, and the entire congregation that might be moved to help.
Because if you lose your money to a gambler, it can’t be leeched away from you by religion.
The stock isn’t a zero sum game. With gambling, there are always winners and losers; with stocks it’s possible that everyone wins. Or even just that there is a greater proportion of winning than losing; whereas with gambling, at best you have a zero sum game where it all cancels out ( in the case of people just gathering for a game ), or where the gamblers take a net loss ( as in the case of casino gambling ).
Stocks are a zero sum game; it’s not possible for everyone to win.
http://www.ittybittycomputers.com/Essays/0SumGame.htm
Their value is a matter of perception; if their value rises, they are more valuable to everyone. Thus, everyone wins when that happens. As opposed to gambling, where someone else MUST lose.
That article you linked seems a real stretch. It just assumes that someone HAS to be losing without actually saying who they are.
Not to those shorting the stock or those that don’t have any. You could use “perception” as an excuse to not label other forms of gambling as not being zero sum games too. So what?
That’s how the stock market works:
It doesn’t assume anything. Those who make money when a stock is sold has made it from others who have lost. This is stock market 101.
Your claim “with stocks it’s possible that everyone wins” is false.
Not likely, but possible.
What’s much more likely is that over time, more people win than lose in the stock market. The amount of wealth tied up in the stock market isn’t static, if you haven’t noticed. The stock market trends up in value over time. People are not losing exactly as much as other people are winning, like gamblers do.
Wrong. If I own stock for a while and sell it for a profit, I’ve won. The buyer has the opportunity to hold the stock now and sell it for a profit, which is entirely possible as long as the company continues to grow. Nobody is losing there.
The stock market is no more a zero sum game than the economy is. The fact that some people lose money in no way implies that those people we required to lose money because other people gained money. There’s no 1-to-1 transfer of wealth, there’s a net increase in wealth, fueled fundamentally by overall growth in the economy.
I think this page probably does a reasonably good job illustrating the Christian objection to gambling. It seems at first glance to be pretty logical (from a biblical perspective, that is), but most of the author’s objections would fall away if he would stop being so doggedly literal and realize that equity is a real thing.
As a de facto professional poker player, I obviously don’t think gambling is immoral, but I do have some ethical qualms about my “job.” In part, this is because a non-minuscule portion of my profits are derived from irresponsible and/or compulsive gamblers, and in part it’s because it’s because I’m uncomfortable doing something that contributes nothing to any going human enterprise.
As to the first objection, while I’m not exactly thrilled about it, I mostly think this is not a serious ethical problem for what I do. Trying to tell strangers that they should quit gambling is going to have bad consequences, and these people are going to lose their money whether I’m playing or not. At that point, I’m not competing with the compulsive gambler, but rather with the remaining players at the table to see who’s going to get the money that he’s forfeiting. Aesthetically ugly, perhaps, but ethically acceptable.
Likewise, the second objection is more a matter of preference than morality. I *probably *don’t have a positive moral obligation to do productive work (so long as I’m not coercively leaching off of others), but it’s far from fulfilling. I have some friends who’ve equated what I do with entertainment: I’m there so the game can come off, and so the casual poker player can pit his skills against an expert. It isn’t nonsense, but nor am I sure this holds water. I do my best to be unfailingly pleasant and gracious at the table, but if I were to leave my seat would most likely be taken by a less skilled player, at which point the other players would be losing money less quickly and, on average, having a more enjoyable time. I think.