The Heresy of "Reparations" and "Progress"

Here's an essay which clarifies the matter of "reparations".  In short, it's an ancient heresy.

Excerpts:

...Racism is a sin. Like every sin, it leaves consequences. “I am sorry I stole your money” does not change the objective reality that a person’s money was unjustly taken. That’s why, in addition to the thief’s sorrow, the thief needs to give the money back to his victim.  

But maybe the theft occurred years ago. Maybe the thief does not even know from whom he stole. Perhaps the thief is even dead. Would one contend his friends, whether or not they knew he was a thief, are bound to make amends in his name?

This is the problem of sin writ large: man can do it, but he can’t undo it.  ...

... That is why Christianity recognizes man needs a Redeemer and that what Christ did vis-à-vis evil could not be done by any other man. An ancient heresy, Pelagianism, claimed he could: sin was merely bad example, and man can lift himself by his moral bootstraps....

That's the heresy behind "reparations"--and for that matter, the idea that mankind can 'morally improve itself' because ........... the Majik of Progress!!!

Let's make a distinction here:  some reparations may be made.  A thief may be able to return the property.  A fraudster may be able to return the proceeds of his fraud.  But a murderer's harm cannot be un-done, any more than slavery's.

 ...A secular society, devoid of a transcendental horizon, consigning sin to the “unknowable theological,” and having imbibed a Rousseauean confidence in inevitable human “progress,” is essentially Pelagian. It believes the myth that it can repair evil and, by following that myth, arguably launches its own vicious cycle of injury. Woke cancellation and historical revisionism are Promethean ploys to undo what was....

One is left with the duty to perform the works of mercy.  Best get to it!