Evidently a church in Michigan has won the lottery.
HASLETT, Mich. – Divine intervention? Or just plain luck? No matter what the circumstances, a Michigan church is $70,000 richer courtesy of the Michigan Lottery. The Covenant Life Worship Center and its 25 members in Haslett, Mich. had one of the second-prize tickets in the Lucky 7s raffle held May 4.
The $10 ticket was purchased at a convenience store in Haslett, five miles northeast of downtown Lansing. The lottery Web site says the odds of a single ticket winning $70,000 in Lucky 7s are one in 55,556. Michigan Lottery officials say the church will receive the full amount of the prize because it is a tax-exempt group.
Pastor Marilyn Parmelee tells the Lansing State Journal that the prize money will go toward the church building fund, setting up a missionary fund and supporting local community service projects.
First and foremost, please consider these biblical quotes as well:
1 Timothy 5:8 says:
"But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
Proverbs 12:11 says:
"He that tilleth his land shall be satisfied with bread."
Proverbs 28:20 says:
"He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent."
Proverbs 28:22 says:
"He that hasteth to be rich hath an evil eye, and considereth not that poverty shall come upon him."
Proverbs 13:11, says:
"Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished; but he that gathereth by labor shall increase."
Now, I was never a believer and I won't even claim to have read the bible cover to cover, though I have read a bit of it for a comparative religions class. I don't like to 'quote mine' the bible but on this point I feel its valid to point out the possible hypocrisy of a christian church that gambles. Personally, I read biblical versus and I just shake my head. This shit is often confusing and worthlessly vague. I looked up these versus not immediately, rubbing my evil atheist hands together as I gleefully attempted to find hypocricy and gloat - no. I looked them up only after listening to my partner's reaction to this news article.
Interestingly, my reaction to this article was a bit of a chuckle over hypocrisy and more annoyance over the fact they they won't be taxed on that money. My sweetie, however, was immediately outraged. He was raised southern baptist but is now agnostic, and the hypocrisy of this story really effected him on a personal level as if by reflex. He was raised that the above bible versus (among others) mean that gambling is explicitly wrong and not a behavior to be engaged in by christians.
Now, this small fellowship has an ambiguous name so it's hard to tell if they are one of the thousands of Christian sects that interpret the bible to say that gambling is wrong or not (though their site does mention living life true to the Word of God). I'm sure if you asked them now, they would certainly distance themselves from any interpretation of their holy text which claims gambling is wrong. That, to me, is one of the greatest strengths of the Bible. The book is a labyrinth of contradictions and vague speech - you don't need to adhere to it, you just make it adhere to you.
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