Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 July 4

= July 4 =

Religion and gambling
Please do not delete this post this is a genuine theological problem as far as I can tell and is a genuine question I am not using it as a forum I’m using it to ask a question.

Religions prohibit gambling but it seems as though religion itself can be a gamble. Choosing one or many gods out of the tens of thousands that have ever existed is taking a huge bet with your immortal soul as in the words of the Simpsons “what if we chose the wrong religion. Each week we just make god madder and madder.”

Is there a name for this conundrum and any relevant debate in relation to it. How might a theologian explain it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.98.87.232 (talk) 23:32, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Pascal's wager is where you should start. DuncanHill (talk) 23:39, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Implicit in "taking a huge bet with your immortal soul" is the assumption that there is such a thing. What demonstrable evidence have you personally encountered suggesting that this is so? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.177.243 (talk) 00:39, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
 * All spiritual evidence is experiential rather than demonstrative. Folly Mox (talk) 02:57, 5 July 2023 (UTC)


 * "Man is the only animal with the true religion - hundreds of 'em!" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:52, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Religions prohibit a lot of things that can be deleterious to the social fabric they're embedded in. Lots of religions tell us not to kill, steal, sleep around, take too many drugs, etc. Gambling can destabilise families' financial well-being. "Picking the right religion" is not something most religions would consider "gambling", since they have an axiomatic view of truth and falsity in spiritual matters. Folly Mox (talk) 02:55, 5 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Tangentially related to your question is the neurological connection between religion and gambling. Apparently there are forms of obsessive–compulsive disorder which lead to both religious scrupulosity and compulsive gambling.  I'm afraid I don't know the answer to this question, but it would be interesting to see if many compulsive gamblers are also religious. There may be a neurophysiological connection found, in let's say, the study of how the gambler's fallacy operates in the brain. Nigel Barber argues that there is a connection between religion and gambling, however tenuous.  Newer research seems to suggest that inclinations towards religion and gambling in the brain have more in common with substance use disorder rather than OCD, however controversial that might sound ("religion activates the same reward-processing brain circuits as sex, drugs, and other addictive activities"). Viriditas (talk) 08:12, 5 July 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure that your original premise is correct; in the UK, churches often raise funds with raffles or tombolas. I'm not much of a Biblical scholar, but I don't recall an injuction against gambling, and although usury is frowned upon, the banking and finance sectors thrive in many Christian countries. Alansplodge (talk) 08:57, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Apologies if I've contributed to any confusion with my tangential comment about the neurological basis of religion and gambling. I think this discussion ended with DuncanHill's first comment pointing to Pascal's wager. Viriditas (talk) 09:08, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Well I find it interesting that science might come to a direction prone to materialy point back at Pascal's simple conclusions and that, without losing sight that the man was from an era very much focusing on mastering the laws of statistics. Monotheism also has something to do with infinity after all, on the other hand, in weighing the relationship between tombolas and addictions, if addictions have something to do with division someone could arrive to that addictions are more on the side of polytheism than to the side of monotheism. --Askedonty (talk) 10:00, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
 * We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. – Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion Martin of Sheffield (talk) 09:07, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Religion is not so much something you choose as something you are born into.  Most children are raised in the faith of their mother.   Conversion from one religion to another is very rare and a highly contentious process (see the fourth link at Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 June 27). 2A02:C7B:301:3D00:10CE:42BE:967B:27F0 (talk) 11:15, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Next to the assumption of afterlife, the question also hinges on the assumption of the existence of beings who can determine the nature and quality of a deceased person's afterlife and care one whit about what they believed. Not all Gods are as jealous as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. --Lambiam 12:01, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

You've conflated a couple separate meanings of "gamble". Religions that forbid gambling are forbidding the most common sense of the word, the financial activity that's the subject of the gambling article. The broader sense of "taking a risk" is significantly different, and it would seem a bit bizarre for a religion to forbid all risk. Nyttend (talk) 23:24, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Verily. They're all about faith in things that can't be seen with the eyes. To some, that is the riskiest possible undertaking. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  00:31, 7 July 2023 (UTC)