If you take something of value from someone, then that is stealing. Holding a person as a slave would be theft amongst other cremes. Crimes would be punished. One way to punch a crime is to make the criminal pay damages to the victim.I think there is something about that somewhere in the good book.
I believe the county has “paid” for slavery with the civil war, civil rights legislation, and affirmative action and the great society. I believe no one in the US today is a “victim” of slavery. Therefore no reparations are warranted. But you basic point about no biblical foundation is incorrect IMO.
My secretary’s family had their farm taken away because they were Amercians of Japanese descent. After the war they didn’t get the farm back. When three of them got 30,000 apiece in the 80s, the land they used to own was worth 1.1 million. If we needed to inter the people and after the war they had done nothing wrong, their land should have been returned or they should have been compensated at full value. otherwise it was theft. Theft is prohibited in the bible.
punch=punish auto text drives me mad.
What was the political party in power that took the land and why did they not ensure that that the lands weren’t held in trust until after the war so that they could be returned? This nation has had a history of such corruption of governmental kleptocracy(ie native Americans)...you still see it when the cops impound a vehicle as the owner was suspected of drug use..only to never get the vehicle back when the owner was adjudged as innocent!(The courts have started to crack down but it’s too little at this point). My point was about what we do before God as individually accountable persons, that is the basis of Ezekiel 18. I can only speculate what I would have done(vote...write letters, ect) to try to correct the situation that your secretary’s family went through...if I had been a Federal judge I would have ruled against the internments of obvious long term or even from birth American citizens(but that would have been me...acting before the Living God and my conscience). The later court decisions did assure some payments but in the 80’s how could you value what was lost...do you take away another innocent family’s house because they didn’t know it belonged to a Japanese family interned decades earlier? I think they could have paid more to the Japanese families; especially those who had strong records of claims and ownerships...Do you also assign a punishment award as well...and how much? The Japanese family’s often had stronger claims then the race baiters do when the spew their reparations claims. They often speak of atonements and blood guilt hanging over all Americans and white people in particular(even irish and other later “arrivals to America that never had anything to do with owning slaves) for hundred of years...there is no Biblical support for what the race baiters try to claim. Shame on the post war generations for not quickly restoring the fortunes of the interned Japanese...but I was not guilty of what that generation failed to do in that regard, 70 years ago, nor do I accept any sort of ‘blood guilt” or a never ending reparations tax over the Japanese Internments! Sin is messy for individuals but limited to the individual at least in terms God’s judgment! Ongoing national sin IS another matter!
There is a fascinating case from the book of Judges about how a Levite took his dead wife(killed and abused by certain men in a city) and cut her to pieces and sent her to all the major areas of Israel(laying the blood guilt on the nation unless the guilty were brought to justice by the whole of the nation). In that case, (like you suggested concerning the civil war), the matter ended with the nation killing those men lest the judgment of God fall on the whole nation. There was no further national “blood guilt” to be carried over into the far far future!
I do fear that the blood guilt of abortion will consume us as a nation and that despite the great many efforts of wonderful Christians, God will decide at some point to act..(.perhaps via Civil War again) and as individuals we can speak out, try to persuade, try to rescue, within the torches of time that each of our lives are endowed with.
Ezekiel 18 speaks of individuals’ accountability before God and as a member of a particular race, you are not responsible for acts of family members 100’s of years removed from you(if they were even here at that time!)...you are however required at times to the extent one is able, to respond to the hurts and injustices that exist all around us now!