Baptists Ban Sports Betting, But I'll Bet Money They're Gossiping in Church Podcast By cover art

Baptists Ban Sports Betting, But I'll Bet Money They're Gossiping in Church

Baptists Ban Sports Betting, But I'll Bet Money They're Gossiping in Church

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 When is it Gossip? So apparently, 10,000 Southern Baptists walked into a convention center, and it wasn't the setup to a joke. It was the setup to cancel everything fun in my life. I'm talking about the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting, where they decided to target—and I quote—"pornography, sports betting, and same-sex marriage, as well as willful childlessness." Now, I get the first one. I understand the marriage thing. But sports betting? Really? You're coming for my FanDuel account? And "willful childlessness"? What's next, are they going to start monitoring who's using birth control? Are they going to have a fertility committee? "Excuse me, Brother Johnson, we noticed you only have two kids. Care to explain?" The Great Fantasy Football Controversy Here's where it gets personal. I'm sitting there listening to this news, and all I can think about is my church fantasy football league. Because apparently, according to these Southern Baptist overlords, I can't have a prize at the end of the season. No money involved. Just pure, competitive sadness. You know what happens when you play fantasy football with no money on the line? People quit. They just stop. Week 6 rolls around, their team is 1-5, and they're like, "Well, I'm done setting my lineup." Meanwhile, you're stuck with some guy who's been starting players on bye weeks for the last month because he checked out mentally sometime around Halloween. I've tried those church leagues with no money. It's like watching paint dry, except the paint is more exciting because at least it's making progress. These people will draft a team, lose three games, and then disappear faster than the church donuts after Sunday service. "Put ten dollars on it for a full season, guys. Come on." But no, apparently that's gambling now. That's the devil's work. Next thing you know, they'll be telling us we can't flip coins to see who pays for lunch because that's "games of chance." Welcome to Oklahoma, Where Everything Fun Is Illegal Living in Oklahoma, this hits different. We finally got some legal gambling options—you can play FanDuel, you can do prop betting on sites like PrizePicks. You pick two or three players, choose over or under on their stats, and if you're right, your five dollars can multiply. But here's the thing about these bets: they're really hard to win. Somebody's always going to get hurt. Somebody's going to have a bad game. Somebody's going to get in foul trouble. Just the other day, some guy placed a seven-game parlay and got all the way to the Thunder game. He was projected to win $238,000 off a ten-dollar bet. The Thunder lost with three seconds left on the clock. That's not gambling addiction—that's just Oklahoma sports breaking your heart in the most expensive way possible. The Baseball Betting Disaster I'll be honest with you: I used to bet on baseball, and it was the most frustrating experience of my life. Think about it—the best players in the league are batting .300. That means they fail seven out of ten times. And these are the good players. You'll bet on a team for a doubleheader, thinking, "They're going to win today." They lose the first game, then they win the second game 10-0, and you're sitting there like, "What did you not just do that the first game when I had money on it?" Baseball betting taught me that sports betting is just paying money to be disappointed in new and creative ways. It's like marriage, but with worse odds. The Gossip Problem (AKA The Real Issue) But here's the thing that really got me thinking. While the Southern Baptist Convention is worried about my five-dollar fantasy football bets, they're completely missing the real problem in our churches: gossip. Our pastor Michael preached on gossip recently, and honestly, it was one of his best sermons. Not because he wasn't preaching at me for once—though that was refreshing—but because he hit on something that actually matters. You know what gossip is? It's talking about someone else's issues with no intent to help them or solve the problem. Simple as that. And churches are absolutely terrible about this. The Prayer Request Loophole Here's how gossip works in church: "Hey, we need to pray for so-and-so because they're really struggling. They got drunk last week, and they're making poor decisions, and their marriage is falling apart, and did you hear about what happened at their job?" And everyone's like, "Oh yes, let's pray for them." But really, we just want the details. We want to know what happened. We want to be in the know. I used to make fun of people who gave "unspoken prayer requests." Like, if you're not going to tell me what's wrong, how am I supposed to pray for you? I need the gossip—I mean, the details—to properly intercede with the Lord. But now I get it. "Please pray for my friend Ben. He's dealing with some health issues." That's it. That's all you need to say. You don't need to go into his entire medical history and how he's not ...
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