Did you ever wonder where the line is drawn between ownership and possession, between taking and stealing?

I am presuming that most Americans think it was OK to take the land they now call America from the Native Americans by force.

Yet somewhere along the way ownership was established and it became a crime for someone to take it from the person who took it from the Native American. Is a deed really proof of ownership or are we merely waiting for a more powerful force to appear and render our perspective of ownership redundant.

Ok so all this happened over 300 hundred years ago and is not relevant to our modern standards of morality and decency.

Well little over fifty years ago a group of dispossessed Europeans decided to dispossess the Palestinian people and set up a homeland in their territory. Without making any political statements on the morality of this action the question that must be asked is did Israel take the lands from the Palestinian people or did they steal it.

Is possession the equivalent of ownership regardless of how that possession came to be?

Followed to a logical conclusion does ownership exist and more pertinently is it possible for ownership to be at all.

How many people in prewar Europe actually believed they had possessions which they actually owned only to be disposed of their possessions and relieved of their ownership right at the business end of a rifle?

Ownership can only be established by force or by threat of force. Possession is equivalent to ownership only for as long as the force that permits it is present and preeminent.

If stealing is the act of taking without the consent of the preeminent force, then consequently taking with the consent of the preeminent force is not stealing and establishes ownership.

Therefore ownership is a privileges granted by association with and adherence to a preeminent force while stealing is ownership established without the consent of the preeminent force.

There is nothing moral here it is just power acting out. While stealing might be a crime within a jurisdiction relative to the governing power, stealing is not a sin against God.

If stealing is to be classified as a sin against God then Ownership must also be a sin against God, because ownership differs from stealing only in that it is sanctioned by the power of the State.