John Mullen, who calls himself “The Village Idiot” wrote a column in the Jan. 22, Port Arthur News. It was titled, “Life’s A Big Gamble.” He confesses to losing lots of money at Las Vegas by gambling.

At the risk of being accused of having a “Superior Twinge,” as Mullen puts it, I disagree that “Life Is A Big Gamble.”

The necessary things in this life are not a gamble. To explain the nuance, a gamble is an unnecessary risk. Life is a necessary risk. For example, we drive to work every day, traveling over the most dangerous places in our country (our streets and highways). This is necessary: “If any would not work, neither should he eat.”

Mullen then also seeks to justify gambling by reference to other foolish ways of spending money. That does not hold water.

Isaiah asks the rhetorical question, “Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? And your labor for that which satisfied not?” He then adds, “. . . Hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good. And let your soul delight itself in fatness.”

Gambling has a cause. That cause is covetousness. A desire to take from another what belongs to him, but without working for it. And that is the definition of stealing.

Paul The Tentmaker wrote, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.”

Paul Burris

Groves