Brock:

I really don’t care about the original topic. I chimed in because the topic took a turn (as many do) when Dave discussed the concept of stewardship.

You then said this:

If life is a gift, it must be freely given, and how you modify or use that gift must be without constraint. If you give a gift to someone but maintain the ownership decisions of that gift, it is not a gift at all but a liability to that person.

This statement was intended to point out to Dave and other readers that the concept of stewardship is misplaced, because there is no gift in the first place.  I pointed out, and nothing in your definitiona changess my analysis, that there exists a common practice that developed around the concept of stewardship.  That practice was the ability to give a gift of a life estate in property by the owner, and still retain ownership.  The legatee of the life estate was trusted with stewardship of the land for the benefit of the owner. 

That same concept applies to what Dave is talking about and is akin to stewardship.  This illustrates the problem with your statement.  Pop Tarts post just reinforces this point w/ a more detailed and more recent development which also illustrates the same problem with your statement. 

Summary:  I don’t care about the original topic.
You miss the mark when cracking on stewardship.

SS:

Sorry bout the flashback.  As to the psych problem that precludes touching I’d recommend counseling.

With regards to fasting it is possible for some people to fast for extended periods, but whether there is any benefit to it is disputable. Certainly there is some documented evidence that short-term fasting (12 to 14 hours) does seem to have some healthy effects on the body, but like just about anything in life, too much of a good thing quickly becomes a bad thing. A number of people have literally starved themselves to death by long-term fasting which shouldn’t come as any surprise because all fasting is is willful starvation of the body in hopes of achieving some end be it political, religious, or health related.

The thing to keep in mind is that there are parts of the body—the retina, kidney, red blood cells and parts of the brain—that are dependent solely on glycogen. In the first 12 to 16 hours of a fast your liver has enough glycogen to keep your system running without complaint, but once that is used up your body has no choice but to turn to cannibalizing itself to provide the glycogen needed to keep your systems running. This process begins before your body switches over to burning fat via ketosis. After the first day and a half or so your body gets the glucose it needs from your muscles by stealing protein from the cells so it can convert the amino acids into glucose. First from inside the cell, which can be replaced, and then by destroying the cell itself, which isn’t as easily replaced. Ketosis kicks in after two days of fasting, but it’ll take 21 days before you body adapts enough to stop destroying proteins in your muscles to make glucose. And ketosis has it’s own nasty effects that aren’t good for you over the long haul.

Are 40 day fasts possible? Absolutely. Thousands have done such fasts previously and often they claim it drew them closer to God (probably because you can get pretty loopy after going 40 days without food). It’s even possible that 100 day fasts can be done by some folks who are healthy and fit, but is it beneficial to do such long stretches? Not from a medical perspective at least.

Interestingly enough, a lot of what we know about starvation’s effect on the body comes from Jewish doctors and nurses in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland in the early 1940s. The Nazi’s tried to starve off 250,000 people with a diet of around 800 calories a day per person. For reference the average child requires 1,000 calories a day. Despite starving themselves, a group of doctors and nurses in the ghetto documented the effects of this diet on their fellow Jews in addition to violating Jewish law by performing autopsies on 492 people who had died as a result of their diet. Among other findings it was learned that once you lose around 40 percent of your lean body mass death wasn’t very far behind.

I understand that you were trying to use the gift/liability analogy to talk about the concept of free will.

BUT, you should have used another analogy because what is being described is what is commonly called a trust.

Your analogy only works if you confine it and read it very strictly, especially the word liability. If I were to give you $100,000 but you can only withdraw it from bank XYZ, then that restriction would according to your definition be a liability. But almost everything has that form of liability. For example, one may purchase land from the state but you may not have permission to say build anything you want (heavy polluting factory).

A dictionary only works to a certain extent and does not end the argument because there are many other things that can affect the situation such as laws, etc. Using a dictionary to end debates is somewhat like a person using the bible to win the debate on the existence of God.

Let me give you a classical example of how a gift may be given to another and yet you still retain decision making powers. For example, you decide you want to protect the wealth of your family and specifically you want to ensure that your child has money, so if say you go bankrupt there is still money for your child’s education, etc. But you do not want to give the money outright to your child because there is a chance that as a say 10 year old he may spend all that money to amass the largest collection of Pokemon. But neither do you want to hold on to it in case you incur some other liabilities and become bankrupt. Therefore you create a trust. There is a deed which sets up the power of the person controlling the property (usually another person but there is nothing stopping it from being the person who gave it gift) and that person makes the decision of how to invest or how much money is to be paid out to your child (beneficiary) according to the deed.

S >>> T >>> B (Benefits)
S: Party that “Gives” or was the original owner of the Property
T: Person who makes decision on how the property is to be invested, distributed, etc according to wishes of S through the deed. (Although S and T could be the same person)
B: Person who “enjoys” the benefits of the property. Wide range. It could be as simple as the right to stay in this house rent free, monthly “income” from the investments, etc, etc… But this person cannot tell T how to spend or distribute or manage the property.

And the property despite being in control by T, cannot be used by T for his own benefit. If T use the property for his own in breach of the trust, he can be sued much like a director of a company stealing money from the company. Think of this as a form (in VERY VERY loose terms) of company. Shareholders control the company but it is the board that makes decisions.

Finally, there is “ultimate ownership” only to the extent that there is an “ultimate fighting champion.” Everything is subject to constraints, thus you could be sued for nuisance even if what you did was entirely on your land. Also, there are land where there are restrictions preventing sale yet no one would claim that the land does not belong to you. Some countries prevent sale of land to non-citizens yet it cannot be said that the land belongs to the government. Even the computer you are using may have some restrictions such as you reselling it to prohibited countries.

Finally, as an aside, I too read about that Indian religious man who has not eaten for the longest time. That and the Buddhist monks in the Himalaya region sleeping out in the cold with only a sheet, while the television crew were freezing to death in Artic winter gear is truly mind-boggling