My reasons for disliking the lottery are many, but I'll just go through a couple. I happen to personally believe that the lottery is morally wrong (more on that later), but that is not reason enough to not have one. I also happen to think drinking is wrong, and whether you think it is or not, you have to agree that while some people are able to partake of adult beverages with little or no impact on their life, some people aren't. With some  people, for whatever reason, that habit consumes their life, destroying everything good and sucking the very marrow from the bones of what they could have been. Because of the destructive side of a habit like drinking, it would be foolish for the government to promote drinking, encouraging it and subsidizing it with ad campaigns and little convenince store kiosks where you can get your 'gummint mad dog'. The government ought to have something akin to a Hippocratic oath , pledging to at least, do no harm. If you choose to throw your life away, it is after all, your life, but the state has no place in cheering you on while paying lip service to stupid slogans like 'drink responsibly' and 'it's for the schools'. The state should neither ban a vice like drinking, nor endorse it.
  By analogy, the same applies to gambling. Some people, for whatever reason, have a real problem with it, and the government should not encourage them by gving it state sanction and accessibility. The lottery, despite all their cute little slogans, does exactly that.
  Its also a lie. They promote it, at least in Georgia by telling us that it's for the schools. But it really is a river of boondoggle money pouring into the state coffers, with an ever-growing adminstration structure that sucks up more and more of the money with less and less making it to the  government schools that my confiscatory property taxes are already propping up against my will. I have actually had people tell me that I'm anti-education because I'm anti-lottery.
  Now the moral issue. One of the saddest things to see is what becomes of a person when they become enslaved by the state through welfare or some sort of subsistence program. It is an enslavement of the mind, proven by the too few who escape that lifestyle. There's an emptiness in their eyes, a lack of ambition, a lack of will and an unspoken assumption that this is as good as it's going to get. It robs a man of one of his greatest qualities; the desire to make something of himself, and promotes in him a victim mentality, a mindstate of 'they owe me'. It is a 'something for nothing ' mentality that is one of the cruelest legacies of the Great Society programs.I submit to you that the lottery is yet another head of that state hydra.
  Our church is located in the middle of the ghetto. There is  'gummint' housing on 4 sides of us, with crackhouse raids and solicitation busts a regular occurence. If you go right down the street to the local convience store around the first of the month, you will see lines leading out the door of people buying lottery tickets with their state checks. You see, they have been conditioned to look to the state for their financial windfalls and the same people who won't go get a job will stand in line because, after all, as the poster (paid for with my tax dollars) tells them "Today could be your lucky day".
  I really do hate the lottery.