All healthy religions emphasize the great value of love.  They must.  Religion is concerned with morality, and all morality is based on Love, Natural Law, Tradition, and faith in Divine Revelation.

The church of natural faith does not look to divine revelation for guidance, so its morality stands on a foundation of Love, Natural Law, and Tradition, and no Divine Revelation.

Love  as a moral foundation has a problem.  Love is not innately good.  Love can be expressed in unhealthy ways.  

Healthy natural morality builds on a solid understanding of healthy and unhealthy expressions of love.  A healthy society of faith, the natural church, seeks to understand what constitutes healthy and unhealthy expressions of love.  It encourages healthy expression and discourages unhealthy expression. 

Revealed religions are based on myths.  Myths by definition are stories that are not proved true.  If the stories were proved true, the establishment would not be called a religion, it would be called a historical society.  

Myths are traditional tools for teaching morality and creating a culture.  A system of myths helps create a culture with a clear system of morality.  The pieces of the mythic narrative are a language of morality.  If you tell a Christian the short phrase “do unto others” they will understand that you are encouraging them to treat others the way they would want to be treated.

Thomas Jefferson believed in the value of Christian teachings, but he did not believe the stories in the Bible were literal truths.  Jefferson believed that the Christian myths provide a fairly healthy set of moral values, but he also recognized their mythic character.

The natural church does not accept myth as literal truth.  It still needs a common language of mythic symbolism to communicate morals. 

The natural church could teach morality literally like in a classroom.  Unfortunately, this kind of teaching seems limited in its effectiveness.  We teach kids the knowledge “don’t have premarital sex,” but when their hormones kick in, that knowledge can easily be overridden by a more powerful instinctual knowledge that says to procreate.

One of the main concerns of natural morality is addressing our powerful instinctual knowledge, such as our reproductive instincts or the surreal state of mind of the fanatic. 

The natural church must provide intellectual knowledge of what is and what is not healthy and positive, but it must also provide practical means for its members to counter instincts that are contrary to a healthy and happy life for the  individual and for society.  

Only a few people have the ability to hold in check on their own their most powerful instincts.  We see examples of this in the phenomenon of dieting.  Most of us can lose weight for a little while, and then we put it back on again.  That a simple example of instinct overpowering reason.  The more powerful the person it seems, the more powerful their instincts.  Some people may be able to resist acting on those instincts as a matter of their natural character.  Other people can control their instincts through ongoing mental training, like monks do.  Most of us do not appear to have that unusual character and most of us will not submit ourselves to the extremes of mental training.

Left on our own, we tend to end up in destructive love affairs, we get caught up in fanaticism that is personally and socially destructive, we fall to substance abuse, we over eat, etc. 

This defines a key part of the purpose of the natural church.  The natural church provides effective checks against powerful natural instincts when those instincts lead to harm.  It represents a positive and healthy morality that is based on healthy expressions of love.

The largest problems the natural church must address are; the lack of a common myth, and the means of countering instinctual behaviors when they are unhealthy.

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