LETTERS: GAMBLING FLIES IN THE FACE OF CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP, LIFE

To the editor:

Re: Amendment 6/Gambling one more time: Economically, gambling is a parasite industry. It produces nothing nor is it even simply entertainment. It feeds on other systems of economic productivity. In a society and community that presently boasts its conservatism, it severely stretches the imagination to blend such a system of meeting fiscal responsibility as sound government.

With the desperate cry of diminishing and disappearing social and human values, it is hardly conducive to the shaping of individual personal responsibility for which there is such a hue and cry. Indeed, it even fosters the abdication of public responsibility to assertively support democratic republican government.

For Christian adherents, even though there is no express reference to "gambling" per se, gambling flies in the face of everything connected with the reasonable pursuit of the Christian stewardship and life. One need only to stumble haphazardly through scripture to be confronted point-blank with standards hardly in keeping with gambling and all its trappings.

In summary, gambling is a bum deal, economically, sociologically and theologically.

GILBERT DEGENHARDT

Cape Girardeau