Are We Gambling With Eternity?
What Is Gambling?
In answering this question, let us begin by actually defining wager, gamble, and bet. Before I was involved in the realm of the casino, I used these three words more or less interchangeably. But each has its own meaning and keeping these distinct will help clarify some issues that come up later.
The term 'wager' is the broadest category. It includes both gambling and betting. It means to put your money (or something of value) up for potential loss in an effort to win money (or something of value).
The term 'gamble' is to wager on a random event such as rolling dice or flipping a quarter. Random events tend to average out in the long term – such as a 50/50 chance on heads or tails for the quarter or a ??% chance of any given number on a die.
The term 'bet' refers to a wager on something that involves skill. This is often applied to sports betting such as a football game, swimming competition, or who can chop firewood the fastest. The main point being that it involves skill and is not a random event.
Take an example of flipping a quarter to see if it lands with heads or tails visible. We can state so much about the odds of different outcomes. The long term average is a 50/50 chance of either side. We know there is an average 1 in 32 chance of flipping it and having heads land five times in a row. We can diagram a standard bell shaped curve to show the likelihood of both short and extremely long streaks or patterns. Yet, if at this moment I pick up a quarter and flip it, we cannot say it if will land heads or tails.
What Is Professional Gambling?
When gambling is mentioned, many people think about a glamorous scene in fictional book or movie featuring a high stakes bet ... or they think of the gambling addict who wastes their life and money pursuing an ever elusive jackpot. The reality is that most professional gamblers make their money through sponsoring products and events.
Knowledgeable gambling is working the randomness contained in games of chance along with a limited amount of intelligent choice. If you do not know what you are doing, you lose money quickly. If you know what your are doing, you lose money slowly. If you are an expert, and you put in the time, you can keep even or sometimes slowly win. The process is time consuming, highly repetitious, and often boring.
The risk is genuine. One must follow the statistical rules built on an understanding of chance just to break even. One must also understand how the casino manipulates odds (makes the house edge) to have a hope of winning against it.
Wagering on Philosophies and Worldviews
In reality, we are wagering, betting, and gambling with both our lives and with our eternal life. We are gambling with both our physical and spiritual being. When we make choices that have any religious significance, do we even know what we are betting on? Do we recognize the impact such a decision will have both short term and long term?
So much that is spiritual gets taught so deceptively. We are fed spiritual things in movies, in cartoons, in children's shows, in adult shows. It may be called 'the force", it may be called magic, or they may simply include rituals that were designed to call demons without telling you that it has any significance at all. We grow up confused about spiritual things because we are not formally taught to recognize and discern what is biblical and what is anti-biblical. And since most believers have never read the entire bible, they are open to such deception.
This page is under construction. My apologies for any misspellings, repeated text, missing references, etc. Please visit again later for a more complete treatment of this topic.