Jim Gilliam missed the point

A friend of mine linked this video. I assume it spoke to him in some way. It is 12 minutes long, however the first 10 minutes are really the important part, and what follows is a reaction to that. It's worth a watch.

"I'm going to come at this from a pretty unique viewpoint, as one who is going through cancer treatments (of the intense variety), is a Christian, and also very, very interested and involved in technology.

I feel like Jim is missing the point. He says he was born again, but everything he says that he was doing paints a picture for me of simply being interested in the political aspects of Christianity. Jim was trying to get involved in a community, and frankly there shouldn't be any more welcoming community than the Christian community. (Though often at times that isn't the case.) In getting involved in this community Jim believed that he was somehow protected from anything "bad" happening to him. Somehow Jim thought that because he was handed something he couldn't wrap his mind around that God, whom he had thought he was serving, had abandoned him despite the many things that Jim had "done" for his God. 

When Jim decided that cancer didn't fit into his view of a loving God, or that he didn't "deserve" what he was going through, he turned to what he calls, "The Internet", which is really just people. He found and supplied a new community for himself. Quite honestly it's a kind of "cloud community". A person will fail you, in fact PEOPLE will fail you, but if you wrap enough of them around you then the percentage of failure drops dramatically. (Just like hooking up multiple servers and asking them all to do a single task, if one is busy another one can take it up.)

The thing Jim missed is that he says that God (not his god, the internet) abandoned him, but he clearly lays out several steps where something happened to him that he can't explain that went on to save his life at a later point. One time when he became a movie producer, randomly, with no real credentials, and then years later that community he had gotten involved with help save his life by playing on the ego of a surgeon. 

He can claim, and you might agree, that that community of people "saved his life", but you have to take a step back and look behind that. How did he get involved in this community, all the steps that got him to this place aren't steps that Jim is responsible for. 

I think Jim is missing another point, the internet isn't a god. Like the "cloud community" I mentioned earlier I think what Jim is seeing is the small movement of the mighty hand of God working in little ways in people's lives here and there. And Jim, if he steps back, can see that what he takes for "the goodness of humanity" or "his god" is in fact the loving hand of his God, working in his life, through the many lives of strangers.

Yes, someone had to die to save Jim… but someone already DID die to save Jim. I hope that Jim takes the time to see his first donor to his life and not mistake the affect of God as a god itself."

~B.
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