The dollar figures across prediction market platforms are bound to exceed more than $240 billion this year, a staggering increase from $64 billion last year. At that pace, the industry could easily reach one trillion by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n
Like Dante and Virgil, until recently I have been happy to pass the soothsayers by in silence until I understood why Dante the poet interrupts his narrative to remind us how egregious the sins of the fourth bolgia are. He knows that no sphere of human activity is immune from soothsaying madness when so much money is involved, including my 9-year-old\u2019s travel-ball team. Apparently, even Little League Baseball is fair game for big bets.<\/p>\n
All of this made me revisit the official Catholic position that gambling, in itself, is not \u201ccontrary to justice.\u201d (CCC 2413) Upon reflection, such teaching makes perfect sense insofar as it highlights the gravity of other things that cause, accompany, and result from it.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Catechism emphasizes that games of chance become sinful \u201cwhen they deprive someone of what is necessary to provide for his needs and those of others,\u201d or when one becomes enslaved to gambling, or when one cheats and deceives to win at gambling. (cf. 2413) Studies<\/a> show that the latter two make the former all the more probable.\u00a0<\/p>\n Who can resist upping the ante when an anonymous trader<\/a> walks away with more than $400,000 after placing a $34,000 bet that dictator Nicol\u00e1s Maduro will be removed from Venezuela?\u00a0<\/p>\n More disturbingly, why was no one willing to track down the identity of that trader once it came to light that the bet was placed just hours before U.S. forces actually captured Maduro? Similarly, two Israelis<\/a> \u2013 both with insider information \u2013 bagged copious sums after waging that Israel would strike Iran just hours before it actually did.\u00a0<\/p>\n The threat prediction markets now present to national security plunges us into the deepest circle of Dante\u2019s Hell in which treason and treachery are punished.<\/p>\n We are lightyears away from grandmothers getting together on Thursday to play bingo in the church basement to support the parish school. We are in an entirely different universe from the friendly office pool during March Madness to purchase a new coffee machine. We live in an age when someone I\u2019ve never met will use AI to place a big bet on my 9-year-old son\u2019s regional baseball championship.<\/p>\n As shocking as this is, it only takes a cursory reading of the Inferno to realize that man, left to his own devices, is just as likely to regress as to progress. Whether you are day trading, dabbling in DraftKings, or deploying your retirement savings in the prediction markets, you are running the risk of having your head twisted around 180 degrees in the afterlife.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pointing to Amphiaraus, one of the Seven Against Thebes who used the gift of prophecy to foresee that an attack on the fabled citadel would end disastrously for everyone involved (which it did), Virgil notes how \u201che\u2019s made a chest out of his shoulders; and since he wanted in this way to see ahead, he looks behind and walks a backward path.\u201d (Canto 20)\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/DicePlayers-1-1024x783.jpeg\")
<\/a>Dice Players by Nicolas Tournier, c. 1620-1625 [National Trust Collections (Attingham Park, Shropshire, UK)]<\/p>\n