What Is The Difference Between Lottery And Gambling?
Gambling is a game of luck and uncertainty, which involves placing a bet, with all the other players agreeing to put their possessions at stake, in exchange for a chance to win the booty. The players can put up anything valuable as stake, such as cash, agricultural lands, or any precious gems that they may have at the moment. Ultimately, the winner sweeps the booty that was put at stake by the rest of the players, without compensating them for what they lost.
Gambling can be of different types such as online betting, slot machines, card games, lottery, etc. Lottery is also a very popular type of gambling, in which the winners can win pre-decided gifts and prizes.
However, gambling and lottery are not patronized in any Islamic nation because in Islam, gambling is a taboo and no Islamic national is supposed to indulge in gaining easy money, which involves the game of chance or which robs the other people of their hard earned money or possessions. Gambling is therefore considered haram by Islam. However, gambling continues to grow popular in the other parts of the world and people love to play lottery and gambling games.
Although gambling is considered to be a sin by Islam, many other nations in the world patronize gambling and lotteries. In fact, gambling is considered to be a highly fun-filled and entertaining experience, that is quite important from the tourism perspective and draws huge crowds from across the globe, as is seen in the case of the casinos in Las vegas. Several nations of the world including Spain, France, Canada, Belgium, U.K, and even U.S are therefore seen encouraging gambling and the proceeding from the lotteries and casinos are donated for the development of public infrastructure.
The craze for lotteries and gambling is very high across the globe and people from all income groups are found to be indulging in gambling. In fact, lotteries have earned the name – “tax on stupidity” because there are very remote chances of winning in a lottery, when compared to the other popular forms of gambling, and yet we stupidly keep buying lottery tickets in the hope of winning some day. Since the revenue generated from gambling is used for social service such as for the construction of roads, schools and hospitals, it is used more or less like the taxes paid by us. Hence it has earned the name – “tax on stupidity”.
A great matter of concern today is that lotteries and gambling have become just a little too common. The trend is so high that numerous instances of compulsive gambling have also been reported from different parts of the world. The patient suffering from compulsive gambling have been reported to experience temper tantrums, depression, anxiety, and a lot other behavioral anomalies such as taking loans secretly from everyone around them to obtain the money to participate in another round of gambling. Although their family members do not give their approval, these patient disobey them and go ahead to participate in gambling. They become very violent and aggressive and desperately want to gamble and win by all means.
Lottery or gambling as such is not a bad means of entertainment. It is just that gambling using stakes is objectionable because by doing so, your hard earned money is at stake. Unless you are rich enough and loss of a few thousand dollars is not a very big affair for you, you must not go ahead with gambling any longer. Instead of stakes, you can use gifts to make your gambling experience even more enjoyable.
Graham McKenzie is the content coordinator for a South African UK Lottery Ticket website, where you can buy tickets to play the UK lottery and stake your claim in the Euro millions draw.
