Our pastor asked me to write something to state why our church will not be applying for National Lottery funding to help its planned building project
'The church
will not be applying for Lottery money towards our building project. Some
people have asked why not, for did not the fleeing Israelites ask the Egyptians
for gold and jewellery and so despoil them? Indeed they did but the Israelites
had been enslaved in Egypt. The Egyptians owed them something. The government
owes us nothing from its Lottery, as we do not buy tickets. The only
‘despoiling’ we can do is to apply for Gift Aid on all donations and so receive
back tax the government has taken from the rewards of our labours.
For us to
seek and accept Lottery funding would be for us to approve of gambling in
general and the Lottery in particular. We believe the Lottery is a tax on the
poor giving them false hope. In 1995 when the Lottery was proposed the Guardian
of 11 November said, “After the French Revolution, the state lottery was
abolished. 'It is all the more dangerous', a leading opponent argued, 'since it
devours the substance of the poor. It was born of despotism, and used with
perfidity to drown out the cry of misery, deluding the poor with false hope.
The lottery, an odious financial trick, invades the product of the poor man's
toil. ‘ ” The Lottery is a redistribution of wealth away from the poor.
The Lottery may not be a very malign way of gambling,
but gambling it remains. With Archbishop William Temple (1881-1944) we believe, ‘Gambling
challenges the view of life which the Christian Church exists to uphold and
extend. Its glorification of mere chance is a denial of the Divine order of
nature. To risk money haphazard is to disregard the insistence of the Church in
every age of living faith that possessions are a trust, and that men must
account to God for their use. The persistent appeal to covetousness is fundamentally
opposed to the unselfishness which was taught by Jesus Christ and by the New
Testament as a whole. ‘
Were we to approve of the Lottery by applying for
funding, we should then to be fair, encourage our members to buy Lottery
tickets. This would not be good stewardship. We would rather you experience the
joy of giving where all your gift goes to the good cause of the building fund
and, if you are a tax payer, the government adds 25% more to your gift by way
of Gift Aid.'
2 comments:
Absolutely agree but I rather liked a definition I heard of the Lottery as "a tax on stupidity".
I call it the morons tax but in the article I was trying to be polite.
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