The Top 10 List – Why Religion is like the Lotto

I wanna be a billionaire so fricking bad
Buy all of the things I never had
I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine
Smiling next to Oprah and the Queen

Oh every time I close my eyes
I see my name in shining lights
A different city every night oh
I swear the world better prepare
For when I’m a billionaire


-Travie McCoy

It was a sad day for literally hundreds of thousands of people last week when their hopes of turning into an overnight millionaire shriveled up with the news that the lottery prize has already found an all-too-happy owner. Weeks before, the tension has been steadily mounting as the pot climbed steadily to a mind-blowing P741-M. Even people who don’t usually buy lottery tickets tried their luck at the guessing which among the 29 million possible combinations will be drawn next just for the heck of it.

Everywhere you go, the conversation meanders its way to the lotto. People were talking about betting techniques, dreaming of ways to spend all those millions, security concerns, and generally how it could change your life overnight – for better or for worse.

Now it’s strange that one of the most vocal critics of the lotto is the Catholic Church who opined that gambling is a sinful vice. But the irony here is that choosing to believe in a religion itself is a gamble. Mathematician Blaise Pascal was credited with formulating what is now known as Pascal’s Wager – that is, he reasoned that betting that there is a god is a winning proposition since you lose nothing but stand to gain everything by believing that there is one.

Now the argument may be sound if there was only one religion to believe in or not. But as it stands, according to Wikipedia, there are over 4,000 active religions, cults, and sub-denominations in the world today, each one claiming that they have the One True God(s) and/or Goddess(es). And in most cases, simply aligning yourself to a specific religion is not enough to “win” salvation, you have follow their often times vague and seemingly wishy-washy rules and regulations as dictated by their “sacred scriptures” so that come Judgment Day, you would have garnered enough points to pass your deity’s imponderable standards. Factor in extenuating circumstances like the accuracy of translating and interpreting said “sacred text” (the bible itself has over a hundred different variations) and depending on which denomination you belong to, you can’t really be sure which rules to follow anymore.

Suddenly, the numbers don’t seem to be in your favor. Religion has become the ultimate lottery game. You play against impossible odds but still, people get suckered in time and again because they’ve got their sights set on the ultimate “pot money” – heaven.

When you ask the man on the street what he’d do if he won the lottery, more often that not, he’d say that he’d put it to good use by making sure that his and his loved ones’ needs are met and he’d make sure that they’d never want for anything else ever again… well that’s “heaven” in a nutshell – the ultimate freedom from all worldly concerns and problems, where no one goes hungry ever again and you spend your days in  eternal happiness with your loved ones forever and ever… and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s an effective lure. Just look at the sales figures for lotto tickets during the height of the frenzy. The odds didn’t improve any more than it was during the last draw, but people didn’t care about that, they had their eyes set on the pot money and were already dreaming of all the ways to enjoy all that money… how much to spend, how much to give away, how much to invest… but now that someone actually walked away P741 million richer, everyone just sighed and went back to their daily grind, hopes dashed but still dreaming of someday being “the one“.

So what lesson have we learned from all this? The analogy between religion and lotto goes beyond winning or losing, so we have the…

The Top 10 List – Why Religion is like the Lotto:

.

  1. You’re playing against ridiculous odds but…

  2. It’s easy to ignore the odds if you’re fixated too much on the prize.

  3. There may not even be a “winner” at and you just wasted all that time and money for nothing.

  4. In most cases, you’re actually playing a Lucky-Pick game, because your choice of religion depends largely not on personal choice, but on the circumstances of your birth

  5. If the lotto was like religion, you are forced to use the same combination every time.

  6. If the lotto was like religion, you can’t bet on more than one combination at a time. That is, you can’t improve your chances of “winning” by playing the field.

  7. You have to play continuously and (pardon the pun) religiously because you don’t want to run the risk that your “number” was drawn on the day you didn’t prepare.

  8. Lotto tickets aren’t free. Bought one at a time, you may think its small change. But add up a lifetime’s worth of constant betting and it’s easy to regret all that time and money wasted on buying losing tickets.

  9. Some people may claim that they’re buying a ticket to “help charity” but everyone knows they’re just after the prize.

  10. There’s no shortage of quacks and superstitious nonsense all claiming to know the secret to getting the winning combination.

And a bonus #11: If everyone just stopped wasting all their time and money betting on the lotto and concentrated their efforts on something more tangible and realistic, a lot of good could have gotten done instead.

In recent senate reports, the aggregate lottery sales of PCSO’s accredited operators have grown to P23 billion in 2009. That’s 23 billion in disposable income that people were willing to throw away in a game with ridiculous odds. Now granted a third of that amount is supposed to go to charity, what if the whole amount instead went to a worthwhile cause? It shouldn’t be too hard of a strain to the imagination to think of ways to put the whole amount to good use, instead of 2/3 of it getting lost to the system.

In the same way, imagine a world where people found more productive ways to spend their time instead of worshiping their deities in the slim chance that he/she/it actually exists. And the same reasoning applies when apologists give the same lame excuse that religion does “some good”. If people *really* wanted to help their fellow men, then wouldn’t it make better sense to spend more time helping people than performing those inane religious rituals over and over again?

In the end, its a question of priority – do you want to spend your time and energy making this world a better place? or do you just want to play the odds that there’s a better one in the next world?

You do the math.

13 comments

  1. Here's one for you, if you thinking LOTTERY terms….
    BEING SAID, within the whole scope of the evolution/creation debate that I contend, the only thing that makes sense of it all, is this:

    If there is NO Creator, NO God, No Intelligent Design, then those that are evolutionary atheists and those that are faithful to their beliefs in God- NOTHING MATTERS, as we all have NOTHING TO LOSE…..

    But, if God, The Creator, The Intelligent Designer does exists, IT WILL MATTER and every atheist of Darwinist belief have a whole lot to worry about and EVERYTHING TO LOSE and again those that faithfully believe in God Almighty still have NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT…

    The God fearing man comes out better on the odds….as he wins both ways.

    The atheist has only a 50/50 chance on a coin flip to eternal life or to eternal death…. It seems the creationist wins outright from the start- evolutionist don't like this, so they go after destroying man's knowledge of God.

    So, why take the chance on believing the 5o/50 chance of claims of atheistic Darwinian thought, and DENY RELIGIOUSLY GOD'S EXISTENCE and lose your soul in the process? If you are going to be faithful in any belief , you are better off in believing in a loving God, than believing in such humanistic, no-loving, flawed assumptions and lies.

    You heard it right- evolution is a more of a religion than most religions are! They pump the dogma into schools teaching flawed, incorrect and a lot of the time-FAKE "proof" of evolution, as you will see and learn on your own if you are willing to research and if you really dig into it with an open mind.

    • You're quite right of course. I also encourage everybody who's reading this to do their own research 🙂

      For starters, read into Pascal's wager, given CREATIONdotWS 's assertion is a classic example of it:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

      Of course, our commenter failed to explain one specific detail – are we even sure that it's HIS god, out of all of the perceived entities out there, that will save us in the end times. Christians will well you you'll go to hell for believing in any other god besides their, while Muslims will tell you the exact same thing with regard to Allah.

      And to stretch that point further, let me ask a theoretical question: Assuming there is a God, do you honestly think that they'd weigh a person's belief in a specific manifestation of divine more than that person's genuine sense of moral goodness and virtue.

      A god that sends people to hellfire just because they didn't believe – despite them being genuinely good, unselfish people – doesn't seem like a god I'd like to follow.

  2. In gambling, the way a person becomes broke is that after they have already lost so much money, that person will try to get back the money he has lost by betting more, guessing that his next bet will win him back his money. But in every gamble, the odds will be the same. You'll lose more times than you win.

    By that time he is already deep in debt

    I remember somebody who i interacted with here saying that a person should have True Faith which is like telling Faith is not enough you must have True Faith.
    If i had Faith then I realize it's not getting me anywhere maybe I should have True Faith. It's like he's asking a person to Bet more after They've lost so much money already in order for them to find God.

  3. I certainly believe that there are many religionists out there whose motivation for embracing religion is the prospect of a good “afterlife”. Not all of them are like that, but a lot of them are. Anyway, although I appreciate the author’s message of illustrating the parallelism with lotto (it’s actually very funny and entertaining), I see most motivation for religion as “insurance” rather than lotto-like jackpot.

    • People betting on lotto already know that the odds of winning the jackpot are slim so losing is often okay. However, people who buy insurance tend to think that receiving benefits from insurance are certain, at least more certain than winning the lotto. Very much like insurance buyers, a lot of religionists think that their god is very real or at least more real than the chances of winning the lotto.

      • How they figure the certainty/reality value despite the lack of empirical data to support their motivation is beyond me. It seems that there is this wildcard called “faith” that they like to use all the time to support the “certainty”. Go ahead, talk to religionists and once they invoke “faith” in the discussion…. you'll see that all bets are off. 🙂

      • That's a good point you raise re: the analogy to insurance.
        Skeptics will most liken religion to a blind gamble while believers will consider it more like insurance.
        Even so, having witnessed the collapse of several big insurance firms here like PPI and CAP, there's still the risk of "paying something for nothing" when it comes to insurance. Its a painful double-whammy when your safety net "dies" before you do 🙁

    • For every church or cult there is a leader who is behind the propagation of the religion he is in charge of.
      The more followers he has, the more influence and power he gains. So the reasons for being a religionist are different depending on if you are a follower or a leader. The leader takes wants to take advantage of the weaknesses of people.

      • Heavens, it's true, especially when election season is near. Even if I don't mention the name of the organization, its public knowledge that it wields power and influence over its members and politicians court it.

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