1. Gambling Spiritual Meaning Spiritual
2. Gambling Spiritual Meaning Synonyms

Just like fornication and adultery have a spirit behind them, so also is gambling. When the spirit of gambling possesses the life of an individual, such a person will have no other thing to spend money on except to gamble. The Meanings of Gambling Tattoos The overall association with gambling tattoos is that of luck, money, and the thrill of the unknown. These tattoos can be drawn with playing cards surrounded by flames, aces and eights representing the dead man’s hand, or a heart surrounded by dice and the words not to gamble with love.

Legislation to limit gambling may be coming for Australia, and most religious groups support the proposed reforms. But gambling and religion have more in common than we might think. Some people seek transcendence via prayer or meditation, others get on the pokies for a fast and heady connection to the Divine.

Transcript

Masako Fukui: Welcome to the noisy glitzy high-tech world of modern day gambling. I'm Masako Fukui and you're listening to Encounter on ABC Radio National.

Expect to hear a lot about gambling in the next few months. It's a hot political issue thanks to independent MP Andrew Wilkie's proposal to legislate limits to poker machine gambling by May next year. Most welfare and religious organisations generally support his reforms but some feel that focusing on a single harm-minimisation tactic over simplifies the complex pervasive and global phenomenon that is gambling. After all, starting with rituals such as the casting of lots or the tossing of bones to divine the future, gambling has been part of nearly all societies throughout history.

In today's Encounter we'll explore the intersection between religion and gambling. It might seem counter-intuitive but the two have very much in common. Both court fate or destiny, both involve mystery, superstition, the distribution of hope. And symbolically, religion and gambling can be seen as the human struggle to overcome uncertainty, by seeking affirmation or the reversal of fortune. Meditating on the meaning of gambling is important in the Australian context. Partly because of the current political debate but also because Australia is the world's number one gambling nation. Jan McMillen has written extensively on gambling issues and is now adjunct professor at the Centre for Gambling Education and Research at Southern Cross University.

Jan McMillen: There are probably three things that make gambling in Australia quite unique. Firstly we are the world's biggest gamblers. Every adult, they lose over $1200 a year. Given that not everybody gambles, that's a lot of money. The nearest comparable country would be Ireland and it's less than half that amount. And the second thing is that Australian state governments with the exception of Western Australia, is heavily dependent on revenue from poker machines in a way that doesn't occur in other countries. 55 per cent of Australian expenditure comes from poker machines. That generates nine to ten per cent on average of government tax revenue. There's a third factor that makes Australia unique. Our history has been quite different. If you go back to white settlement, gambling was tolerated by the British administrators, and they gambled themselves. There's been some debate about whether our indigenous aborigines gambled but there's increasing evidence that certainly in the northern parts of Australia they had their own forms of gambling that had been brought by the Macassan people from Indonesia. But it was the British forms of gambling that really took off. And it basically became widespread, particularly horse racing and games like two-up which was a version of pitch and toss. Irish immigrants and Chinese immigrants brought games with them. The Catholic Church was struggling to get funds for their schools and they turned to gambling as a way to raise funds, so Catholic churches ran bingo. And so progressively by the end of the 19th century, it was widely accepted as a predominant social activity.

Masako Fukui: So, we do have a quite liberal attitude to gambling in general?

Jan McMillen: Yes, and I think it is because the churches have not had a strong voice in shaping gambling policy. And when they did in the 19th century, it was mainly about social concerns. The churches mainly took the approach of being social reformers and were concerned that the working class in particular were going to slide into poverty as a result of their gambling. So it wasn't a moral or a religious opposition to gambling per se, it was a concern with the potential social affects of excessive gambling.

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Tim Costello: The gambling industry is literally so powerful. When there is this much money at stake, no one gets in the way of it. Certainly state governments don't. So, the state church task forces along with other many people in the community really worried about the spread of gambling saying, 'How did this happen so quickly? No-one ever asked us about now betting on footballers as if they're race horses.'

Masako Fukui: The Reverend Tim Costello has been campaigning against the abuses of gambling in Victoria for many years. He's now chairperson of the newly established Australian Churches Gambling Taskforce, the first national taskforce, which lends support to the Andrew Wilkie reforms.

Tim Costello: Our memorandum of understanding, which we've all signed up to is taking seriously sports betting. It's taking seriously the growth of internet betting; that essentially the infusion into the community of the spirit of gambling is now at epidemic proportions and has counter productive impacts. I've never been a prohibitionist but I understand the moral arguments. Very simply they are that if I have a win in gambling, my joy can only be at the expense of someone who had a loss. It's a zero-sum game. So how is it moral for me to be happy when someone is sad? But as a person who wasn't a prohibitionist I got involved because when pokies started in Victoria around the time I'd become mayor of St. Kilda, I noticed people who had businesses and homes getting addicted and losing it all. And I thought, 'what is it in the nature of this product, and why weren't there any consumer warnings?'

Brian Lucas: So without doubt in our community there is a small number of people who have an addiction to gambling in some form or another. The Church would say that those people need some assistance with their addiction and social policy should be such as to minimise the risk of that small group of people engaging in behaviour that is personally destructive for themselves, and often leads to significant mental health problems and even suicide, and also has a devastating affect on their family because of the dissipation of most of their financial resources.

Masako Fukui: Father Brian Lucas is the General Secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

Brian Lucas: Well, the fundamental moral position with everything is, 'what is it that I ought to do?' And I think that everyone would agree that, 'I ought not behave in a way that puts my mental health at risk. I ought not behave in a way that puts the resources that I have available at risk.' So it is a moral issue how people use their money and the way in which they gamble. For people who spend modest amounts of money and that's relative of course to their means, for legitimate recreation, there's nothing immoral about that. But if people gamble in such a way as to put the needs of their family secondary to the addiction to gambling well that is seriously a moral issue.

Masako Fukui: Some Protestant churches as well as Islam hold prohibitionist views on gambling. But the Catholic Church and other members of the Australian Churches Gambling Taskforce see gambling as a matter of individual choice. And this view is reflected in Australian public policy. It defines gambling as a consumer issue and sees harm minimisation from potentially dangerous products like high-speed poker machines as the main way to deal with problem gamblers. But this mainly market-based analysis fails to address the all important 'flutter': that momentary excitement accompanying the anticipated win, which is at the heart of the gambling experience and keeps gamblers coming back despite the odds.

Tim Costello: I think the experience of, 'do I matter in life? I'm just one of six billion people. Will there be a surprise that is spiritual?' I think all of those things are at play in a whole range of different walks of life, including gambling. And I think the fate, the sense of grace-grace mainly means gift and surprise. So the experience that little ordinary old me who never wins anything, who never has anything exciting, when I hit the jackpot on the pokies machine someone up there has noticed me, and that affirms and validates who I am. I think that is a quasi-spiritual experience. My problem is that it's equally a corrosive experience that then gets you chasing it again.

The religious concept in so far as in Christianity you go to the Bible, is that the cast of the die is in the hand of the Lord. The Creator who built order into our lives has called us to not just to live in community but minimise belief in risk, fate, chance. For the reason of safety and community. I think that's why people who are more religious don't gamble as much. I think there is just that sense of alignment with my spiritual beliefs that don't require the excitement to come from chance.

Masako Fukui: Chance, or the idea that things happen for no reason is deeply disturbing to humans. And our quest for knowledge and meaning has always been about seeking explanations. But chance is unique in that it's both risk and fortune, chaos and luck. And it's the tension embodied in this paradox that's played out in gambling games. So chance is exciting. With the flip of a card or the spin of a wheel, fortunes can be made or lost. And fate can be transformed.

Reading: 'Early humans threw and read virtually anything for portents. Including plants, sticks, stones and bones. Cleromancy, the casting of lots, would gradually evolve from sacred ritual to profane amusement: dice. Lots could be made from anything. But small bones became the preferred medium. The astragalus also called the huckle bone is a bone immediately above the talus or heel bone. In many animals particularly domesticated sheep and goats, the astragalus can be thrown to produce a more or less random result, though modern day craps players bear little resemblance to Sumerian priests rolling the bones for hopeful supplicants.'
(From Rolling the Bones. The History of Gambling. By David G. Schwartz.)

Charles Livingstone: The earliest origins of chance are associated with rituals of divination in which you know, you let the chickens out of the coop and see which way they fly. Or you look at their entrails or you pull straws and throw them on the floor. These sorts of rituals...

Masako Fukui: Dr Charles Livingstone is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Health Social Science at Monash University in Melbourne.

Charles Livingstone: These were very important rituals to many ancient civilisations including the Romans and the Greeks who were regarded as the constructors if you like, of our own civilisation. And what they were doing was they were trying to get in contact with, I guess we say with the forces of randomness or of chance, but they saw them as fate. That fate actually occurred in a way which we could foresee and that by undertaking these rituals we would somehow get in contact with the power of fate. And we know that people were gambling for money certainly at the time of Christ, I think didn't the centurions throw dice for Jesus' cloak beneath the cross? So we know that gambling has been associated with divination but it's also been associated with commercial purposes for a very long time. And I guess you could say that there is a continuum from divination or gambling if you like as religious activity with spiritual intent at one end of the spectrum, and hard core poker machine playing in a Las Vegas casino or a Sydney rugby league club at the other end.

Masako Fukui: On ABC Radio National you're listening to Encounter. In the deterministic worldview of ancient civilisations, mystical forces controlled chance events. And to divine fate was to ask the gods, 'will I be lucky or will I be prosperous?' But the changes in the intellectual climate brought about by the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment changed all that, paving the way for a whole new human relationship to chance, uncertainty and gambling. And fundamental to this shift in thinking, was the discovery of probability theory. Alan Hajek is Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. He's both a philosopher and a mathematician.

Alan Hajek: The first major breakthrough in the understanding of chance happened in the 17th century. This was with the Pascal-Fermat correspondence. They were interested in gambling games, and they wanted to analyse games like dice throwing, and that's where probability theory was inaugurated. So probability is a way of understanding what we would now call chance. In the 18th century we get into the Age of Reason and chance was called the superstition of the vulgar. We have Hume saying that, 'it is commonly allowed by philosophers, that what the vulgar call chance is nothing but a secret and concealed cause.' This is a century of the triumphs of Newtonian mechanics and the thought was that really, the world is deterministic, and that what we would call chance is really just our ignorance. This changed in the 19th century with the burgeoning of social statistics. So various phenomena, births, deaths, crime rates, suicide rates; while they were unpredictable on an individual basis they conformed to large scale statistical regularities and so now suddenly there was a place for chance in understanding these social phenomena and then chance really came to the fore in the early 20th century with the advent of quantum mechanics and the thought is that physics tells us that the world itself is chancy. And think if you like of radioactive decay as a paradigm case of chanciness in the world. It's not just a matter of our ignorance.

Masako Fukui: So what happened between the 17th, 18th centuries and the more recent 20th century?

Alan Hajek: I'd say a big part of the development was the mathematics associated with chance. So, for example the so-called central limit theorem, and the so-called laws of large numbers-these were these beautiful theorems that codified what happens in the long run. You know when you have lots and lots of cases and this was as I say, connected to the mass of data on social phenomena. So people started to notice that there were certain regularities like you know the so-called Bell curve; the normal distribution as we say, seemed to govern a lot of these social phenomena. So this was part of what we would call, 'the taming of chance.'

Masako Fukui: With the taming, or the secularisation of chance the occurrence of random events was now in the realm, not of mystical forces, but of mathematical calculations and could be expressed in degrees of likelihood, all as odds. And it was the same French mathematician, Blaise Pascal who also secularised belief in God, with the now famous 'Pascal's Wager.'

Alan Hajek: Pascal, famously drew a connection to theistic belief, again through probability theory. He thought the ultimate gamble was whether you should believe in God or not. He thought that reason could decide nothing here, but he thought you could wager for God. There are two ways the world could be: God exists, God does not exist. And two things you could do. You could believe in God or not. And then according to Pascal, if you believe God exists, you get salvation and infinity of infinitely happy lives. And in every other case you just have your finite earthly life and then you die, and that's it. And if you give just some probability to God existing, then he calculated that you're better off wagering for God, believing in God than not. Believing in God had, as he would put it, infinite expected reward. Not believing had only finite expected reward. And you want to maximise your expected reward just as you would do when you go into a casino. So in a way he's using the very same formula and now applying that formula to if you like, the biggest decision problem of all: whether you should believe in God or not.

Masako Fukui: The discovery of probability has important implications that can't be overstated. It's the basis of how we order the world, from calculating life expectancy to explaining quantum physics. And of course thanks to probability theory, the global gambling empire boasts a business model that never loses. With odds set to always favour the house, the industry worldwide turns over around $400 billion a year. In Australia it's about $19 billion. But more importantly probabilistic thinking signalled the end of determinism and ushered in an era where indeterminism, or uncertainty, became a condition of life. So while it's possible to calculate the occurrence of chance events like a big lottery win, we can never be certain when it will happen.

Alan Hajek: Probability theory is a beautiful mathematical theory and the theorems are well understood and so on. To that extent we have quite a good mathematical handle on chance.

Masako Fukui: But probability theory can't explain the single event can it? So if I roll two dice ten times, I can, theoretically calculate the probability of two sixes coming up, how many times. But I can never predict one single event. I can never predict the next event. So how useful is probability theory to the gambler?

Alan Hajek: Yeah. So I agree with that. That's right. There is a problem of predicting single events. It's one connection between probabilities and what actually happens, goes through the so-called frequentist account of probability. The probability is long run relative frequency. You want to know what the probability that the coin lands heads is, well toss the coin! Hopefully many times and just count, how many times does it land heads? Divide that by the total. So if you toss the coin 100 times and it lands heads, let's say, 53 times, alright, the frequentist says the probability is 53 divided by 100. But notice, it was a long run frequency and frequentism famously fails on the single case. Exactly the case that you're worried about. It just shows you how hard it is to make the connection between probability and what happens.

Masako Fukui: So are you a good gambler?

Alan Hajek: I'm a good gambler in the sense that I stay away from casinos because I know that they're rigged against me. I know that if I keep playing in a casino I will come out very poor. So I'm a good gambler in the sense that I don't gamble much.

Reading: 'I deduced from the scene one conclusion which seemed to me reliable: Namely that in the flow of fortuitous chances there is, if not a system, at all events a sort of order. For instance; suppose the ball stopped twice at a dozen outer figures, it would then pass to a dozen of the first ones and then again to a dozen of the middle ciphers and fall upon them three or four times and then revert to a dozen outers. Whence after another couple of rounds the ball would again pass to the first figures, strike upon them once, and then return thrice to the middle series, continuing thus for an hour and a half or two hours. One, three, two. One three, two. It was all very curious.'

Charles Livingstone: I think what gambling does is it provides us with yet another form of this, if you like, divination. This capacity to be in contact with the universe, with fate.

Masako Fukui: Gambling researcher, Dr Charles Livingstone. He argues that modern day gambling, like divination, is about deliberately courting chance. And the infinite possibilities that chance represents are a conduit to an intrinsic metaphysical condition of life.

Charles Livingstone: It is something which people react to very strongly because it is almost a human instinct to want to be connected with what I call the stream of indeterminacy.

Masako Fukui: What is this stream of indeterminacy? Is this some kind of ...what once might have been called, you know, a connection with the gods or with something sacred?

Charles Livingstone: Yes it's a connection with the gods. I guess the physicists would tell us that the universe is not indeterminate, that it is in fact just very big and we struggle to understand it. I mean essentially it is the same thing. What we've got is a reality, which we can never fully comprehend and in its place we have a series of categories which we institute which enable us to understand the world. So we have other people we classify variously as, you know, family, friends, foreigners and so on. So we categorise everything into one of these boxes and that helps us organise and manipulate the world. The thing that's missing from that of course, is the original sense we had as infants, as children, that there is endless possibility out there and that everything is connected to everything else.

A Greek-French philosopher called Castoriadis, Cornelius Castoriadis, argues that our original experience of the world is as a magma, that is a sort of a molten slurry, where the possibilities of life are boundless. It's God-like. It's like knowing the universe in its entirety. We all still have in us the desire to be connected to the infinite. I think that is a very real desire. And some people work that out through religious experience. Some people work it out by jumping out of aeroplanes and hoping their parachute opens, and a lot of people in our society, because they have neither the inclination nor the opportunity to do those forth mentioned things, find it in poker machines.

What the poker machine does is it provides you with instant access, commodified access, to a device, a game, a machine which plugs you straight back into this stream of indeterminacy. What one of the gambling industry representatives at a senate inquiry a couple of years ago called, ' a torrent of probabilities.'

I guess you could argue if you were a cynic, that the churches have taken this desire themselves and sort of turned it into a codified system of meaning and belief and sold it back to willing buyers over many thousands of years and, I mean you can take that with a grain of salt if you like but essentially I think that's what's happened. That people's original desire to be connected with the infinite, to be exposed to this stream of indeterminacy, to understand the world in all of its glory, is something that the church has instituted in the first instance and have been selling back to us ever since. But what the poker machine does is it takes that in a very refined form, packages it up in a way which is very attractive to some people and sells it back to them. So what you're actually selling people is something that they themselves create; this desire to be connected with the infinite, and you dress it up in a computer and very big probabilities too; I mean we're talking about 80 million possible outcomes and so to all intents and purposes the number of outcomes is effectively infinite, and selling it back to them. So what you're actually paying for and in many cases paying very significant amounts for, is what your own mind if you like is desiring most of all. I guess you could do it by meditation and I guess that's why many people find meditation very attractive and very helpful in their day to day lives.

Masako Fukui: So you're equating meditation with pokie machine playing? Are they very similar to the human mind in terms of results?

Charles Livingstone: Well I don't know whether they're similar to the human mind but I think both of them come from a desire within humans to be connected with something other than themselves. And I think what meditation does in a much more I think healthy way is to allow people's minds to relax, to wander free, to make the associations they want to make or not make, as they see fit. But what the poker machine does is that it sort of slams it back at you at 100 miles an hour.

Tim Costello: It's always very hard to know if a person goes along to a Hillsong conference with 50,000 people and there's a spiritual experience with fantastic music and great connecting-do we know that stopped them going to Star Casino? I mean it would be interesting to track. As to whether it is a substitution, a surrogacy for spiritual needs, it's got some truth to it but I don't know how representative of most people who play pokies or gamble, how true that is.

Masako Fukui: Tim Costello.

Charles Livingstone: The rise of rationalism saw the end of whatever lingering connection there had been between divination and mainstream religion, certainly in the West. You know, Nietzsche said, 'God is dead.' What he was suggesting was that humans had killed off God. Because even though we still wanted to be in contact with, what for want of a better word, we might call the Divine, rationalisation meant that our basis for believing in God was radically undermined. Even though that was necessary for the rise of capitalism and we had to have the Reformation, as Max Weber pointed out, in his famous work The Protestant Ethic, that without the rise of the Reformed churches where people had a direct relationship with God, it would have been impossible for us to institute a modern capitalist society, where people made decisions based on rational principles. So I guess you know, the rise of capitalism laid the seeds for the rise of commercialised gambling as a means of many people anyway, reconnecting with that spirit of indeterminacy, which I think is a very important principle that underlies much human existence.

Masako Fukui: Charles Livingstone. On ABC Radio National you're listening to Encounter. And the program today is about gambling and spirituality.

If life can be seen as a constant struggle against uncertainty, then gambling is like a microcosm of this drama being played out on a computer screen. The gambler has access to virtually an infinite number of possibilities and with the push of a button, can experience the illusion of being in control of the next outcome. And that could be why poker machines that offer these moments of perceived control at a mesmerizingly fast pace, are considered to be the most addictive form of gambling.

Jane: I'd be at the casino in Sydney, and I'd stay there for two days, nearly three days sometimes.

Masako Fukui: Jane is an ex-gambler who had a problem with poker machines up until about four years ago.

Jane: I just seemed to sit there in like a...more like a zombified state but I'd still be intentionally looking at the machine for a free spin. You are aware that you've been there, but you're not sure how long. And as long as you've got some money, and you seem to go through a high and low like a battery. Your body feels like it's just going into an overdrive state, where you feel like you're there and around you-you know what's happening. It's just that you're only interested in the whole game and you're not really physically drawn to any distraction outside of what you're doing yourself-which is just sitting watching a machine continually, over and over repeating itself, over and over.

Charles Livingstone: What it is is, a period of intense concentration on what's happening inside the game that they're playing. People who report this tell us that every other concern they have melts away and it's as though the only thing in the universe is them and the machine. And there's numerous stories-I've heard them personally but I've also read many accounts of stories-where people are so preoccupied with playing their game that someone can collapse in the seat next to them, the machine next to them, less than a metre away and be carted off to hospital or die in fact in one case that I've read, without that individual actually paying attention to it.

Masako Fukui: Would you say that poker machines are specifically designed to induce that kind of state?

Paul Delfabbro: There have been rumours of psychologists being involved over in America, but the manufacturers I've spoken to in Australia assure me that they don't have similar people here working away in the background.

Masako Fukui: Associate Professor Paul Delfabbro is a psychologist and gambling researcher at the University of Adelaide's School of Psychology.

Paul Delfabbro: Machines in general, because of the way they are designed, do tap into many psychological processes. The very basic principles of classical conditioning plays a role in poker machine gambling so people come to associate excitement with the experience of being immersed in this form of activity. And from an operant conditioning point of view, we know that their behaviour is easily maintained by reinforcement schedules where the rewards are randomly determined. So you sort of think that the next win could be the jackpot. We know that people can persist for very large numbers of trials without winning in the hope that a win will eventually occur.

What happens of course is that over time, people get used to playing long periods and this sort of long term waiting behaviour becomes conditioned. So people become more and more resilient to losing. And we know from a lot of research that having a large win soon after you started gambling is often a strong predictor of subsequent interest. The more you obtain these wins, the more conditioned they become. So the paradox or irony is that the more a person becomes a problem gambler, the less they gamble for enjoyment. Often you'll find that the regular gambler gets one of these big wins and they'll sit around and look to the admiration of their friends, they'll sit back and enjoy it. Whereas you'll find the problem gambler, they often just sit there very blankly, and just feed all the coins straight back into the machine. It becomes very much driven by a form of behavioural inertia. They go into almost a trance like state sometimes and often will gamble for long periods and then suddenly realise how long they've been there.

Masako Fukui: There's been a lot of research exploring the relationship between gambling and psychology. But there's still no definitive theory on why some people gamble until they zone out, and others can just enjoy the occasional flutter. But one thing nearly all gamblers do is ignore reason and the insights offered by probability theory.

Alan Hajek: Gamblers in real life do various things that we think are irrational. For example they commit the so-called gambler's fallacy.

Masako Fukui: Mathematician, philosopher and non-gambler, Professor Alan Hajek.

Alan Hajek: After a long run of one outcome, they think it's more probable that some opposite outcome will occur. If you're tossing a coin repeatedly, after a long run of heads, the gambler's fallacy would be to think that tails is more likely because it's somehow due. So we think that that's an irrational use of probabilities, and famously there have been statistical studies that suggest that these apparent runs of one event can just be explained statistically. There's no control. It's just chance. It's like we wish, or we think that we can somehow control chancy processes. Yes, superstition...you think that if you're wearing your lucky hat then somehow you're more likely to win in the casino.

Jane: They say that they pray to the pokie god.

Masako Fukui: Did you pray to the pokie god?

Jane: Yes I remember it was about four o'clock in the morning and I pulled up at another venue and I asked the god for a sign about whether I should go in and play this machine. And it was so ridiculous. I asked him if I could see a bird or something and then suddenly a couple of birds walked past the back of the car. So I assumed it was my answer! My calling.

Wu Yi Zheng: If you ask any mahjong player they believe in quite a few things. A lot of them wear red underwear.

And the lucky numbers. Chinese have this thing about the number eight. Number six is not too bad either.

Masako Fukui: But the number four is a very bad number isn't it?

Wu Yi Zheng: Yeh. Because 'si' is the same pronunciation as 'to die'. So yeah.

Masako Fukui: And where do these superstitions come from? Are they sort of embedded in the culture?

Wu Yi Zheng: I see it as something that is passed on from generation to generations. People just have that belief, but don't necessarily understand where that belief comes from or what the underlying meaning is.

Masako Fukui: Dr Wu Yi Zheng is a research fellow at the Centre for Military and Veteran's Health at the University of Queensland. His research studied the interplay between superstitions or irrational beliefs, and problem gambling among Chinese Australian mahjong players.

Wu Yi Zheng: People play at weddings, play at funerals, Chinese New Year seems to be a big time for people to actually stake quite a bit of money on that. I think with Chinese New Year a lot of them see that as a way to establish their luck. If they win quite a bit of money during that session it's a sign that it will be a prosperous year. I guess on the other hand if you do lose, then it doesn't give you a very optimistic view of what the year to come...yeah.

Masako Fukui: So the meaning that mahjong has. It's not just a social thing. It's about luck. It's about tempting luck?

Wu Yi Zheng: It's about superstitions as well. They continue to gamble because they have superstitious beliefs that I guess drives them. The more superstitious you are, the more likely you will continue to play. The superstition in a way drives the persistence in playing, even though some players are on losing streaks or are they're not actually winning money from it.

Jan McMillen: My father used to bet on the horses quite regularly. And he worked very hard at his betting. He read the form guide from...every word of it. And there was very little luck in the way he approached his gambling. It was a game of skill for him. But yet, when he won he said he was lucky.

Masako Fukui: Gambling researcher Jan McMillen.

All gamblers play games of chance with the conviction that they're going to win. Without this powerful belief in one's own luck gambling would be pointless. And what blowing on the dice or wearing the lucky hat does, is allow the gambler to dream the big win, to hope for a life changing event, to believe in the transformative power of chance. Superstitions then are more than just irrational beliefs. They're one way we persuade chance to favour us; a kind of personal narrative, or in the case of the Chinese mahjong players who share similar superstitions, a collective narrative, that connects us to fate, to the metaphysical. And the meaning we ascribe to gambling is hidden within these narratives. Will I win? Am I lucky? Will I be blessed? are ways we seek affirmation and to rewrite our own personal encounter with fate.

But interestingly very few people claim their motivations for gambling have anything to do with the spiritual or metaphysical. Here's Jan McMillen again.

Jan McMillen: Over 50 per cent of people regularly say that they gamble either for pleasure or entertainment. Interestingly, as a way of coping with stress or depression or grief. Social isolation is a major factor for some people, which I think is a sad indictment on our society. And the other reason that comes through quite often is they gamble to be with their friends, for social reasons. Very few people admit to gambling for money. That's way down the list. Which is an intriguing thing. It sort of explains why people are willing to continue gambling on machines, poker machines while they continue to lose.

Jane: Sometimes I go in to socialise. And there's not much socialising. But usually a win. I usually go in to play to win.

Masako Fukui: So in all those years of gambling, did you end up winning?

Jane: Ah. No. I never bought anything of any value that I'd won off a day or night of gambling. Never. Usually I would play the money back the next day. I thought I was working and earning a lot of money. So I didn't really understand the value of the money I earned. And then I put it into the machine, and I didn't feel like I had it in my hand. I don't know. Just money was money.

Charles Livingstone: The thing that money does in our sort of society is it provides a sort of universal connection. It is the thing which connects everything to everything else. In our sort of society there is very little that you can't get with money. And so money has this sort of symbolic meaning. Money of itself is simply an abstract concept, and these days it's really abstract. Most of us don't see most of the money we have. It's a series of zeros on a computer screen. In a sense it's itself a connection with the infinite, with the universe. It's the fount of possibility. And that's why gambling with money is what gives it its meaning in a Western capitalist society. And that's why if you set up a bank of poker machines which you didn't have to put money into, they wouldn't have anywhere near the same effect for the people who use them as putting the money in is. The interesting thing about poker machine gamblers, certainly the ones I have spoken to and I've spoken to hundreds, is that without the money the game has no meaning. But once the money is in the machine and they're playing the game, the money has no meaning. The game takes on the meaning that they want it to. They're connected to the universe by plugging in the money, and they win not because they want to take home a bundle of money. They win, or they want to win rather, because they want to continue their experience, their exposure to the stream of indeterminacy. While the game's on, money doesn't mean anything, it's just a means to the end, but a very important symbolic way of getting into the game, of giving it its initial kick start of meaning if you like.

Masako Fukui: Money may not have much meaning for the hard core gambler but there's no doubt that gambling today is all about money. Gambling is a massive commercial concern. But it wasn't always like this.

Jan McMillen: You know, I've lived long enough to see the changes that have occurred in the post-war period, and I think the changes have been quite dramatic. Not only in the types of gambling but the role of gambling in our society. Australians now are far less likely to gamble on the types of games that their parents or grandparents gambled on. The games that do still exist have been transformed to conform to that profit motive and to their provision in large venues like casinos and large clubs. Most of the contemporary forms of gambling, that element of control that gamblers have over the games and over the outcome, has been diluted significantly. The outcomes are pre-programmed in the software, and despite the fact that people think that they can have some control over the game, they have no control at all. It really is a matter of chance. And where gambling was once a localised community activity in Australia; it was run by your local church group or the local welfare group or even your local bookmaker, it's now a large commercial, big business where the games are standardised and increasingly global. So you can walk into an Australian casino and it looks very much like a casino in Singapore or Las Vegas or the United Kingdom.

Masako Fukui: So in this brave new world of gambling, what role can religion play? Dr Charles Livingstone of Monash University.

Charles Livingstone: I think they have an important role because they do provide, I guess a moral and ethical counter to the pure commercialism which dominates so much of our lives these days. I mean you know, life is not about money. Life is about our feelings, about our spiritual connections, about our inner life. The problem we have is that in so many aspects of life, these, you know, very basic human desires are commodified. They're appropriated by commercial interests and turned into something which is essentially about making money. You can see exactly the same thing about sex. There's a world of difference between someone enjoying a happy healthy sexual relationship and someone who's obsessed with porn. And I think, you know, most of us would say that it is a good thing to have happy healthy sexual life. It is not a great thing to be dependent upon porn magazines or internet porn, or whatever. There's a similar phenomenon occurring with gambling and its connection with spirituality. Yes, it does provide spirituality, but it is to a healthy spiritual life as porn is to a healthy sex life. They are chalk and cheese.

Masako Fukui: On ABC Radio National you've been listening to Encounter, and today's program was called 'Gambling Spirit'. Thanks to all the guests in the program: Jan McMillen, Reverend Tim Costello, Father Brian Lucas, Dr Charles Livingstone, Professor Alan Hajek, Associate Professor Paul Delfabbro, Dr Wu Yi Zheng and Jane.

If you have any comments about this program, please visit the Encounter website and leave your response on our comments page. We'd love to hear from you. The address is abc.net.au/rn/encounter. You'll also find a transcript of the program and download and streaming audio links, so you can listen to the program at any time. The sound engineer was Steven Tilley. I'm Masako Fukui. Thanks for listening.

Guests

Jan McMillen

Adjunct Professor, Centre for Gambling Education and Research, Southern Cross University

Rev. Tim Costello

Chair, Australian Churches Gambling Taskforce

Fr. Brian Lucas

General Secretary, Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference

Dr. Charles Livingstone

Senior Lecturer, Department of Health Social Science, Monash University

Alan Hajek

Professor of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

Wu Yi Zheng

Research Fellow, Centre for Military and Veteran's Health, University of Queensland

Paul Delfabbro

Associate Professor, School of Psychology, University of Adelaide

Jane

Ex-gambler

Publications

Music

Gambling Spiritual Meaning Spiritual

Credits

Gambling Spiritual Meaning Synonyms

Producer

Masako Fukui