Perhaps bringing up Monty Python’s Life of Brian on Christmas Eve is a bad look, but God is notoriously forgiving. And given how absurd human beings can be, He clearly has a sense of humor.

As a teen I was one of the few in my circle who didn’t “get” Monty Python’s humor. Given how cerebral their best bits are, I suspect that most people’s love of the troupe derives less from their genuinely funny bits than from the slapstick that runs through their work. And I am not a slapstick guy.

Most members of the troupe were educated and Cambridge and Oxford, and their slapstick hid a keen eye for the absurdities of human society. No class of Britons escaped their biting humor, although as an overeducated intellectual my favorites are the jibes directed at my own class. As younger men (mostly) in the 60s and 70s (Cleese was half a generation older than the rest) they tended to lean Left politically.  But as countercultural comics they refused to ignore the absurdity of their fellows as often as they made fun of British culture. One of my favorite bits is from Life of Brian, and you will recognize how far seeing Monty Python truly was.

Monty Pythons “Life of Brian” 1979 predicted EVERYTHING we’re seeing with Gender Ideology.

It’s not about reality. It’s about symbolically affirming a man’s “right” to be a “woman who has babies”pic.twitter.com/W5R5l1tcBJ

— Audra Facinelli 🇺🇸 (@audraf637) December 24, 2022

Cleese’s final line captures the essence of the modern revolt against nature, and I would argue–against the inclinations of Monty Python itself–the struggle against God himself.

What unites the modern Left is a revolt against human nature. And that struggle against human nature, I would argue, is a revolt against God Himself.

It is true that one can conceive an idea of Nature as a lawgiver without embracing the existence of God, but the abandonment of God places one on a very slippery slope. Cleese’s observation–that Leftists view not only the political structure  but reality itself as oppressive–is absolutely true. The gender ideology movement is proof of that fact.

But if there is no God, reality can be made to bend to our will. Technology exists to assert human will as superior to Nature’s limits. And in principle those limits are as often malleable biologically as physically.

If human beings can figure out a way to send hundreds of tons of flying machine speed through the sky, why not apply the same technological tools to remaking human existence? Science fiction is filled with dreams about overcoming human limits, and “gender affirming care” is but a crude attempt to overcome “reality.” At some point in the future the technology may mature to the point where creating a simulacrum of a male or female out of its opposite will become possible.

So why not do it? Is it really so different than splitting atoms and transmuting them into other elements?

Well yes, it is, if you believe in God. And no, it isn’t, if you don’t. If human beings are made in God’s image–and we can disagree about exactly what that means and still believe that our humanity has a God-given essence–then fundamentally transforming our nature is a revolt against our nature and God’s will.

If we are simply biological machines with a will, then will itself is the limiting principle. If we can do it, why not?

Nietzsche recognized this and argued that Will itself is the essence of the universe, and the only limiting principle without God is what can be willed. If God is dead, nothing is forbidden. Even he found this prospect scary.

Undoubtedly Monty Python’s members had read Nietzsche, and understood the implications. They rightly rejected those implications as absurd, although they didn’t make the step to embracing God. Perhaps that is because the stories we tell ourselves about God also seem absurd. The Virgin Birth, for instance, is not rationally explicable. Miracles cannot be explained. If the world is matter in motion, then believing in miracles is absurd.

Yet without God nothing is truly absurd, because without God there really is no limit to human will.

God or Will. That is our choice.