Latest / CrossPolitic Show / Why Gambling Is Gay
Transcript
- With your thumbs, you can fund missionaries, or you can find your own destruction. Sports betting apps that have exploded since legalization started back in 2018. Sports gambling is now legal in 40 states and Washington DC. It's not an accident that pornography and online gambling have exploded at the same time. The lack of self-discipline that sends a man like an ox to the slaughter on only fans. You've saved up all my debts. You've saved up all my debts. You've saved up all my debts. It's the same folly that sends a man to fan duel. The common sin is covetousness. The lust for your neighbor's wife or paycheck is ultimately lust to be gone. Gambling does not build homes or families or nations. Gambling is not honest labor that produces God's blessing of fruitfulness. The founders of our nation in America, they knew this and they passed laws to drive that cancer out of our land. But it has returned with a vengeance. We're going to show you what gambling actually is, what it is theologically and economically, and how a nation that once called gambling theft learned to call it entertainment instead. In 2024, Americans spent over $200 billion in gambling service. That's right. But it's continually to rise as we speak. Yeah, we're talking about gambling as a lifestyle in a lot of cases and it has become a systemic mess. And the old days, you had to go to the red light district to find a prostitute. Now you can find a virtual hooker with a few clicks on your phone. The old days, you had to find a riverboat or a casino in some out of way place or infamous city. But now you have a slot machine in your pocket. Gambling addiction is not a failure of will. You won't break even. You won't win. The average debt of a gambling addict can range from $15,000 to $90,000. Hi boys, who are we betting on? We're seeing young men in particular just swallowed up by sports betting. Now, because it's such a small amount of money that you're just entraining you and it's just on your phone, you don't have to go out to the casino or anything like that. Guy designed a man to pursue one woman to work for her, to sacrifice for her, to be faithful to her across years, and to receive that reward for that labor to her in love and in the rearing of his children and in the bearing of his children. Pornography promises that reward without actual work. It rewires the soul to seek pleasure through false intimacy. Gambling does the same vein to a man's economic lifestyle. The thrill of already you're simulating participation by watching sports. And then on top of that, you're going to simulate this further competition where you have actual stakes in the contest. Both gambling and porn are fundamentally gay. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Fundamentally gay. Yeah, even heterosexual porn is gay. It's paying women to act out the fruitless sexual fantasies of men. It's paying women to think and act like men who have a now female bodies. Instead of the hard work of loving a real woman and receiving the reward of that loving labor in her beauty and the children that she bears. Gambling is not merely a bad habit with bad results. It is itself the bad result of a broken and corrupt worldview. The worldview of gambling denies the existence of a personal creator, covenantal god, who sovereignly governs the world with that covenantal wisdom and love. The gambling worldview sees history as random luck. In the gambling worldview, blessings and rewards are not sovereignly administered to coming to keepers. They are just the luck of the draw, the role of the die. Sometimes you just get lucky in the gambling worldview. The idea for deeming your time, right? You have limited time as a finite creature and you need to glorify God with your efforts. At least with day trading, you're supporting real goods and services. Day trading is like gambling in that you think you have more of a control over the variables than you really do unless you have insider tracks somehow. One thing that's not wrong with day trading is that day trading is buying stocks and stocks are like a brick, right? They represent part of a company. But the very least, you're investing money in something that does something at least theoretically. It provides good service. Well, that's the problem with sports betting, right? You're not providing a service to anyone. You're taking your knowledge of the game and the different attributes that you think you can deduce the outcome from. But it's not what's bringing them to the world. That's simply just taking money from other people and bringing it to yourself without any true benefit added anywhere, right? It's all about naked capital. The gambling cosmology looks at the universe and sees randomness. No sovereign God, no covenant, no faithfulness, no meaningful connection between your labor and your fruitfulness. Just odds, just luck, and all of that at the role of a dice. Like the world's random, if blessings and wealth are just luck, then why should we work? The gambling worldview is functional atheism. It is destroying the man who inhabited it. Are we all just fundamentalists now? We're the fundamentalists right all along, no cards, no dice, no games at all. Well, there's a massive difference between playing a game of luck just for fun, on occasion, and being given over to gambling and pillaging your neighbors, or at least hoping to. Even with the kinds of gambling and games that take skill, there's no meaningful work actually taking place. The main reason I got out of being a card counter wasn't because it was gambling. It's not gambling by any meaningful definition of the word, word. But what it also wasn't, it wasn't what you could consider work. Work is activity that produces a good service and good work is an activity that produces a good service to the glory of God and for the benefit of your neighbor. When God's world, work is central, work is good. Sabbath rest includes the principle of recreation, games, and entertainment. But if games and play become the main event, the primary focus, you're inverting the Christian worldview. So, you talk about Person A, works all week, produces goods and services, and meets the needs of humanity, is doing all the things they're supposed to be as a moral Christian person. And then on Friday night, they go out and play a few cards of Blackjack for fun, the way they might go to a movie or go out to dinner or something like that. I think that's very different than those that are using it as a replacement for income. The odds are against you, and they are not creating value. So to the degree, it goes beyond recreation and into any form of cash flow, generative activity, I believe it represents a replacement, a substitute for our God-given duty to work and sustain ourselves and our families. While the fundamentalists may have slightly over corrected in their complete ban of card games and games of chance, we may very quickly be wishing we had listened more carefully to them. But I would argue it isn't so much that they saw the potential of the bad thing, is that they already were living in the good thing. To the extent that one is filling their time with productive useful activity, and to the extent that the society expects that, the issue we're describing right now is not frowned upon in the society. It is not looked at as some fringe behavior. It's become very mainstream. That to me is a far bigger issue, symptomatically of what ails us than just the activity itself. Richard Baxter, one of the most rigorous Puritan theologians who ever put his pen to paper, wrote that gambling is wrong, quote, because it is a means of getting other men's estate without just labor or exchange, and ordinarily is the effect of covetousness and tends to stir up covetousness in others. This is the principle of community justice, the requirement of proportional equality in every economic exchange between persons. When you exchange something at a fair price, you give money. The merchant gives you the goods. Both parties are happy, and they walk away with something proportional to what it was that they bought. That is the moral order that God has ordered and built inside of this economy. And the gain is not at all proportionate to the labor or value rendered. The whole idea is to get money without working or producing a good or service, and leaving your neighbor poorer. The Puritans argued that God has ordered society to flourish through lawful callings where wealth ordinarily flows through industry, through skill, through sacrificial services, and good stewardship. Gambling is designed to bypass this natural order, and therefore it is contrary to God's moral order of society. I believe JC Riles' father had gambled quite a bit and had pushed their family almost into bankruptcy at some point. And one of the reasons he was very particular about money, and so Gambling has been around a long time, the idea that you can change your entire life here in a second. And when I was in high school, Augusta Cicino came into our town and gave us a new football stadium, new singlets, a wrestling team, made our rose look all nice and all this. And just a few years after I moved away, I mean the crime had drastically increased, right? Some people can go to a Cicino and bring 200 bucks with them and have almost like fun at like a arcade. But folks that have never seen how that quickly can be wrong before you know it, they are betting the rent. Gambling is practicing covetousness, game without productive work, and plundering your neighbor. The confessional standards of our reform forefathers, it lists wasteful gaming among the sands forbidden in the eighth commitment. In a false balance is an abomination to the Lord Proverbs 111. So how did a nation that used to call gambling theft and that built laws to constrain it turned into a nation that runs Cicino ads at every Sunday night football game almost continually. It should not be legal to steal your neighbor's stuff, even if you agrees to let you, if you get lucky. By the 1800s most states had ban lotteries and gambling was largely illegal nationwide because of all the crimes and corruption that accompanied the practice of gambling. It was the great depression that changed everything. Nevada 1931. The Great Depression has just gutted the American economy. Nevada is broke and someone in the state legislator had a great idea. Legalized gambling. The argument goes, we need jobs, we need tax revenue, we need economic stimulus. So you can't trick real wealth out of covetousness and theft. In God's world, fruitfulness is the result of hard, honest labor. But Nevada tried and instead of being a cautionary tale, it became a motto. New Hampshire was the first state to legalize a statewide lottery in 1964 with lawmakers framing it as, quote, voluntary taxation. Doesn't seem like an accident that New Hampshire was among the first states to legalize gay marriage. And their lottery income was earmarked for education for the kids. But what exactly were those legislators teaching their citizens? Well, they were teaching them that productivity is a game of chance. And that faithfulness is random. And the path to a better future doesn't run through your hands of hard work and labor towards God and your neighbor know it runs through a lottery ticket. New Jersey opened casinos in 1976 in Atlantic City and by the 1980s most states had laudaries. The US federal government legalized gambling for tribal reservations in 1988 and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. And many Midwest states legalized riverboat casinos during the 1980s and the 1990s. And then in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the federal restrictions on sports betting in Murphy versus NCAA. Welcome gambling into their 21st century. Today gambling is openly advertised ubiquitously during major sporting events. We went from a nation of Puritans that called gambling legalized theft to a secularized nation that calls it entertainment and builds infrastructure to spread it. The reframe is complete. And the cost is not just cultural, it's personal and it's catastrophic. But we'll get to that in just a moment. First, we've been talking about what man practice and what that practice turns man into. 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Yeah, they all did. I wouldn't because you see the ads so much. Yeah. And as long as you're doing it with money, you can lose. That's the thing. And understand that the house always wins. Right. The reason casinos casinos don't come. Right. They know what the odds are that a person can win. Casinos actually don't even mind if you win on accident when you're a vantage player like I was for three years from outside that blackjack team. They'll kick me out even when I'm losing. And the lottery's are the worst. On average, you wage your $10 million. Winners receive $6 million. The house they keep $4 million. That's not luck at all. That's just engineering. And then there's this thing that casinos call the near miss. It's the slot that almost paid out. The hand that almost won. This is engineers specifically produced a neurological sensation of almost winning, which keeps you addicted and feeding the machine long after your money's gone. State certified counselors are seeing a surge of people calling hotlines for help with gambling addictions this holiday season. Meanwhile, critics see casinos expanding. And there's plenty of studies that show that there is a very similar dopamine release that many compulsive gamblers get that would be very equivalent to what a lot of drug addicts and alcoholics get. It comes with all sorts of corrosive side effects. Casinos are happy to allow you to play while you're winning. Because they know you'll eventually get back more than you can ever imagine is that yes, you can have a couple wins. What do you have over your lifetime? Well, if you're playing against math, it's going to be in the negative and they're good at math and they know that and that means you are the chump. Don't be a chump. Don't be a chump. Even with the lot cast into the lap, the Bible says that its every decision is from the Lord, Proverbs 16, verse 33. God's and probability are just mathematical descriptions of how God personally rules the universe. When you build a system on the premise that God is not sovereign, the next logical step is to control the brand of Mr. Self. Our component understood this. The black socks understood this. Pete Rose, he definitely understood this. We watch sports just to enjoy the root on the boys that represented our local town. Wherever we lived. There was a sort of covenantal nature to it where it's almost like if they win, we win, because they're us and they represent us. Now there's less relationship with your local team. It's even more disembodied and be located and now it's just who can make me to money, as opposed to having some sort of relationship. But God does tend to do things a certain way and He wants us to understand that His creation has a design to it. The math represents part of that design. Gambling is where you're saying math doesn't matter. You know, luck in the sense that it's this almost like a power or something that rests upon you and I'm feeling lucky tonight. I know I can't lose or whatever. Not that things are actually governed by intelligence. The very first command is the blessing of fruitful work. Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea over the burns of the air and over the heavens and over everything that moves on the earth, Genesis 1-28. Proverbs explicitly warns about wealth gained without work. Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished, but he that gatherseth by labor shall increase. Proverbs 13-11. The Puritans considered gambling and abuse of the sovereignty of God. Many Puritans allowed for the solemn use of casting lots in imitation of the practice and the scripture of discerning God's will. William Perkins wrote, we are not to use lots except with great reverence in that their disposition comes immediately from the Lord and their proper use is to decide great controversies. To play games of luck where significant sums of money are on the line, the participants, whether they know it or not are asking God to orchestrate this unjust economic exchange. They're asking God to distribute the spoils of covetousness and theft. Gambling itself is some kind of micro attempt at controlling providence. Every major sports association, MLB, NHL, MBA, have all had scandals involving either referees or players in this way, either trading inside information, like the injury list or something like this, or betting themselves on the game. We still don't let Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame because of this. It's like this new, as if they didn't know this was going to create a host of problems. This is infinitely foreseeable. You're going to destroy the game itself. What they're banking on, I'm assuming, through the advertisements, is actually people aren't really care. They're most interested in the betting, not the actual contest. Eight million Americans have severe to moderate gambling problems. Twenty percent of chronic gamblers, they declare bankruptcy carry an average debt of $50,000 per person. The cascade, marriage is breakdown. Domestic violence begins to happen. Children are neglected. Depression sets in. And suicide. Children does bring forth death. I think it demoralizes everybody when you have low public moral standards and when these things are so prominent that they're just everywhere. Gambling's not only unfruitful, it is positively corrupt and destructive. It denies God's sovereign blessing of work and it tries to take its place. But it not only leads to punishment, it is itself the punishment. But a gambling lifestyle is perfectly consistent with nihilism. And I think we have to reject those false worldviews for the falsehoods that they are and live out and model the right sense of community, character, behavior that we believe in. So I don't think that gambling is going to lead to the bad society other than its role in the negative feedback loop. I think gambling is a consequence of these things breaking down. And it becomes not the crime but the punishment for the crime. Gambling is gay. It is economic autonomy. It creates vicious cycles of fruitlessness and regret. I think to get this right, you have to have the right view of the world. How does the creator, us as the creature? And I believe it is undignified for us to promote somebody, being a couch potato, a pot head. You end up getting people doing dumb things. What kind of man are you becoming? What kind of world do you live in? Is it a world ruled by a faithful father? Where your labor is seen? Where your covenant faithfulness is rewarded? Where fruitfulness is the ordinary consequence of ordinary obedience? The people that get lottery tickets all the time are bad with money. And one of the great evidence that this is the fact is the large number of them that go bankrupt within five years. Their problem wasn't that they didn't have enough money. Their problem was they didn't know how to use the money that they had. If you give more money to a foolish person, you're just going to get more folly. One of the great lies behind gambling, I'll get so much money that I won't have to be good with money. That's not how it works. Sometimes God destroys people, he judges them by giving them a lot of money. People should consider that sometimes winning could be the very end of the good life you have been living. To sin is to be brought into bondage. It usually has a brief euphoric rush, a dopamine hit, and there you are in the handcuffs of regret and shame. It is training men to think in terms of random luck and nihilism rather than the glory of hard work under God's covenant faithless. It trains a man to live for a quick, you for a buzz rather than for the blessing of building a life for a wife and children over generations. It is practicing a blasphemous lie about the nature of the world that God has made. In God's world, there is no such thing as love. Even the lot cast in the lab, it's very decision is from the Lord. Sports betting does not cultivate gardens. It does not build homes, it does not strengthen families, it does not bless nations. It trains men to seek gain without work. Because of the work of Christ, your work is meaningful. Because Christ took the curse of sin and death and rose from the dead, your labor is not in vain. The devil always offers shortcuts, but the end of that road is barren and fruitless and lonely. Christ came that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly. 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