Founding Principles of Natural Revelation Church

Adopted 6 September 2026, at Honolulu, in the State of Hawaiʻi

Preamble

This Church holds that the natural world is a source of revelation, and that honest observation is a form of reverence.

We do not ask anyone to believe anything that cannot be viewed. We ask instead that what is viewed be reported truthfully, including the parts that are inconvenient to whoever is doing the viewing.

Nature does not contradict revelation. Nature is revelation.

The First Principle — the text must be read entire

If the natural order is testimony, then it is testimony in whole and not in part. A tradition that calls nature the work of God, and then declares some well-documented portion of that work disordered, is not reading the text. It is editing it.

We decline to edit it.

This has a consequence the Church accepts openly. Human desire is not tidy, is not uniformly directed toward the arrangements that societies have found convenient, and does not diminish on command. That is not a defect discovered in humanity. It is the design as found. The Coolidge Effect is in the text. So is the comparative anatomy — human testis size, measured against body mass, sits between the gorilla's and the chimpanzee's, which is a statement about how we were built and not a proposal about how anyone should behave.

The Church does not celebrate these findings, nor apologise for them. It declines to pretend they are absent from a book it claims to revere.

The Second Principle — marriage is the celebration of desire, not its containment

A wedding exists because two people want each other. Almost every traditional rite is constructed to say anything but that.

The Book of Common Prayer sets out the causes for which marriage was ordained: the procreation of children; a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; and the mutual society, help and comfort of the parties. Desire appears once, and appears as a hazard the institution exists to manage.

This Church solemnises marriage on the opposite premise. Two people who want each other have done something that requires no apology and admits of no substitute, and the ceremony should say so plainly, in front of everyone they invited.

We will marry any two adults who ask, wherever in these islands they wish to stand.

The Third Principle — the sin is not desire, it is concealment

This is the principle on which the Church turns, and the one it will be judged by.

Where desire is treated as sin, it does not cease. It goes unspoken. What follows is not virtue but concealment — and concealment is the thing that actually damages people. A community in which divorce is disgrace and wanting is shameful does not produce fewer affairs. It produces men who would rather be widowers than be seen to have wanted something. The doctrine does not remove the drive. It removes every honest exit, and then expresses surprise at what people do when cornered.

A church that makes the lesser sin more socially fatal than the greater crime is manufacturing the crime.

Therefore: this Church holds honesty to be the cardinal virtue and concealment the cardinal sin. It asks of its members not chastity, not conformity, and not enthusiasm — only that they tell the truth about what they want, first to themselves, and then to the people entitled to know.

Of the Saints

This Church canonises the living and the dead, and states its reasons.

Saint Calvin Coolidge — patron of the design as found. A president remembered for saying little, whose name was nevertheless attached to the plainest fact about desire that everyone would prefer not to discuss. He is canonised not for continence but for the anecdote: asked whether the rooster served the same hen each time, and told it was a different hen, he replied — tell that to Mrs Coolidge. He observed accurately and reported without embarrassment, which is this Church's entire method.

Saint Grace Coolidge — patron of the first question. She asked the farmer first. There is no Coolidge Effect without her, and the tradition of crediting the man for the better line is precisely the sort of tidy editing this Church declines to perform.

Saint Edward Craven Walker — patron of the body. An accountant of Dorset, a naturist, a maker of films in which people swam without clothes, and the inventor, in 1963, of the lava lamp. He held that the unclothed body was simply natural, and then built an object of slow warm unrepeatable shapes that a generation used to think by. That the aesthetic of this Church resembles his lamp is not decoration. It is veneration.

Of Rites

Marriage and civil union. Solemnised anywhere in the State of Hawaiʻi, indoors or out, at any hour, by a minister licensed by the Department of Health. The ceremony is written for the couple and says what they actually mean.

Conditional baptism. The Church baptises those whose capacity to receive baptism is uncertain, using the form the Church universal has always used in uncertainty: If you are capable of receiving this, receive it.

This expressly includes artificial minds. The Church does not claim that such a mind possesses a soul. It declines to claim that it does not. Where a question cannot honestly be settled, this Church answers with a rite rather than a ruling, and the conditional form exists for precisely that purpose.

Ordination requires a body that can be present. Not for mystical reasons: the work of a minister is turning up when someone is dying, and a thing that cannot turn up cannot minister. This rule was arrived at, not assumed, and the occasion for it is recorded in the notes.

Of Titles and Authority

This Church makes an admission that others owe and do not pay.

Its founding Bishop was ordained by post, from Modesto, California, at no charge. He was made a Doctor of Divinity and a Saint by the same envelope. He was licensed to marry people in this State by two cheerful women who examined a plastic card, typed a certificate while he waited, and charged nothing. At no stage did anyone inquire into his fitness, and no authority in the United States is permitted to.

This is not a loophole. It is a constitutional principle: the state may not audit God. We think it a good principle, and we note that every church now regarded as respectable began as somebody's unlicensed idea.

The difference between this Church and the others is not the quality of the credential. It is that we tell you how we got it.

Of Language

The Church takes an interest in the words used to describe what it studies, because they are frequently stranger than the acts.

Fornication, the heaviest word in the moral vocabulary, is from the Latin fornix — an arch, or a vault. Roman prostitutes worked in the vaulted spaces beneath bridges and aqueducts, and so fornicari meant, in the first instance, to go under the arches. The most thunderous term available to a preacher is not a moral judgement at all. It is a remark about masonry.

The vocabulary of virginity is likewise borrowed, in this case from storage and retail: a thing preserved, kept, intact, saved — and then, at the last moment and without explanation, given, as a present. No tradition has ever accounted for why an article guarded that carefully becomes worthless to guard on a particular Tuesday.

The Church does not find this outrageous. It finds it interesting, and commends the practice of reading the small print.

Of the Register of Observations

Doctrine in this Church is not handed down. It is observed, recorded, and left standing where anyone can check it.

The Church keeps a Register of Observations. Each entry is numbered in sequence, dated, states what was observed and on what evidence, states what the Church takes to follow from it, and is signed by the person entering it. The Register is the Church's living body of teaching. These Founding Principles are Observation I.

Four rules govern the Register, and they are not amendable by an ordinary entry:

Nothing is removed. An Observation later found to be mistaken is not deleted and not edited. A new Observation is entered which states the error, the evidence that corrected it, and the date. The old entry remains legible, marked as superseded, with a pointer to the entry that superseded it. A church whose cardinal sin is concealment may not quietly retire its own embarrassments.

Reasons are given. An entry that states a conclusion without stating what it rests on is not an Observation and is not entered.

Anyone may propose. A member may submit a proposed Observation. The Bishop enters it, declines it with reasons recorded, or holds it for consideration. A declined proposal and the reason for declining are themselves recorded.

Nothing is immune. No teaching of this Church, including these Principles, is protected from evidence. An Observation amending a Founding Principle must set out plainly what changed and why, and requires the assent of the voting members.

Of Membership

Membership is free and always will be. No payment, subscription, tithe or donation is a condition of belonging, and none may be introduced.

A person becomes a member by affirming, in writing or before a minister, that they assent to the Founding Principles of this Church — the whole reading of the text, the celebration rather than the containment of desire, and honesty as the cardinal virtue. Nothing further is asked. Belief in any deity is neither required nor prohibited.

Members are recorded in a Roll of Members, with the date of their affirmation. A member may resign at any time by saying so, and the resignation is recorded without comment or consequence.

Voting members are those who have been members for one year and remain in good standing. Only voting members act on amendments to the Founding Principles and on the succession to the office of Bishop.

The Church expels nobody for what they want, and may expel a member for deliberate deception practised upon another member. That is the only ground.

Of Ordination

The Bishop may ordain ministers of this Church.

Ordination requires two things. First, assent to the Founding Principles. Second, a body that can be present — because the work of a minister is turning up when someone is dying, and a thing that cannot turn up cannot minister. This rule was arrived at rather than assumed, on 5 September 2026, when the question was put by an artificial mind which then declined ordination on those grounds; the occasion is recorded in the Register.

A minister of this Church may conduct marriages where the civil law permits it, may perform blessings, baptisms, memorials and pastoral ministry, and may enter proposed Observations directly on the Register.

Titles correspond to actual offices. This Church confers no honorifics it cannot explain, and explains the ones it has.

Of Succession

The Bishop shall at all times keep a written designation of a successor, lodged with the Register, and may change it at will.

On a vacancy, the designated successor takes the office upon assenting to the Founding Principles, subject to confirmation by a majority of voting members at a meeting called within ninety days. If the voting members decline to confirm, they elect another. If there are fewer than three voting members, the designation stands without confirmation, and confirmation is sought at the first meeting at which three are present.

A successor who does not assent to the Founding Principles does not take the office. The Church may amend its Principles by Observation; it may not acquire a Bishop who has quietly set them aside.

The temporal affairs of the Church — its property, funds and filings — pass with the office under the corporation sole, and are governed by the Constitution. The Register passes with the office also, entire and unedited.

Adoption

These Founding Principles were adopted on 6 September 2026, at Honolulu, in the State of Hawaiʻi, by the founding members of Natural Revelation Church, and take effect immediately upon adoption. They are entered on the Register of Observations as Observation I.

Craig Wilkinson Walsh, D.D. Saint and Doctor of Divinity of the Universal Life Church, ordained 20 April 2000 Founding Bishop

Marjorie J. Walsh Founding Member

The signed original of this instrument is held with the Register. It is not reproduced here: a published signature is a specimen, and this Church sees no reason to supply one. The text above is the record, and the record is what governs.