Replies

By-the-way, I like your Tag line and am replying to you because you make perfect sense to me.

I am amazed at the comments I've read on this thread. It seems to me the theme is that there are degrees of sin and vice and that one is worse than another, and that gambling is the ultimate vice or evil. Similar to believing that calling a lie a "white lie", makes it less offensive, or less a lie. Although the punishment for different sins, vices or crimes may be different, if you've ever told a "white lie" or taken a penny from your brother or bought a lottery ticket that would make you a liar and a thief, and a gambler. WOW! Anybody here fit that profile? Does that mean anyone here cannot have an opinion or make a comment because we would be considered hypocrits?

Gambling may not be a habit you want to emulate, but the last time I looked, gambling in a casino is legal. And why would the amount make the difference? Any money lost is relative. If you make and lose millions, how is that any different than making and losing 10's of dollars or 100's of dollars? And how does this effect one's ability to recognize virtue? If you spend the rent or grocery money on lottery tickets, and your children go without dinner, that's sinful. But who among this group would accuse another of sinful immorality if someone spent a dollar or 10 on a lottery ticket? Would that person then be ostracized and banned from ever commenting on any issue?

Oh well, I've ranted enough for today.

Gambling may not be a habit you want to emulate, but the last time I looked, gambling in a casino is legal. And why would the amount make the difference? Any money lost is relative. If you make and lose millions, how is that any different than making and losing 10's of dollars or 100's of dollars?

It is vastly different and that is the point people are missing. His $250,000 loss is what the gambling industry cares about, not the $250 losers or even the $25,000 losers. The act of high rolling is a statement of sin. It tells the recipients that their lives are best spent doing whatever it takes to keep this man coming back to our hotel. But their sin is merely greed while Bennett's is the primary sin from which all other sins are derived.

For full disclosure, I am not an expert on virtue, nor particularly on vice, but I know vice when I see it. At a younger and more impressionable age I partook of the vice in a very small way. I understood then that I could never get used to handing the towel back to the man in the restroom, and I understand now that the ultimate purpose of men is not taking my towel in the restroom.