Responding to your four points:
1. I do believe I expressed myself precisely (in the sentence you quoted) while keeping it as short as possible. I shall rephrase at greater length, in case this will help.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, the King sends certain people to his Dungeon: specifically, green-eyed people, pickpockets, and virgins. In this world I’m imagining, those are the facts, and I acknowledge those facts. Nevertheless, in this imaginary world, I find this whole situation morally offensive. I morally object to the dungeon’s existence and to the reasons for which people are sent there. Ultimately I realize that the King’s Law, though an unfortunate situation, is not a transcendent moral law. What is the transcendent moral law? Well, if no one can point toward anything else that is supposed to be simultaneously “more transcendent” and “more moral” than the King’s arrangement, then I conclude that there are no transcendent moral laws at all.
By analogy, the same goes for the idea of the afterlife. I can (provisionally, for the sake of argument) suppose it is a fact that some go to Heaven and others to Hell (just as sunshine and rain are facts). But I might still find reasons to morally disapprove of this arrangement. And if the afterlife is a fact but not a “Moral Law,” then probably nothing is a Moral Law, and I have to be OK with that.
Probably our root disagreement here is that I believe there is no transcendent fact-of-the-matter to resolve moral questions. Many moral questions have no credible debate (they have settled and essentially “correct” answers); others remain controversial; and some are mostly personal. In any case, I believe that moral truth is established by humans. All we have are our opinions, reasons, and debates; there is no transcendent benchmark to judge our correctness. Collective human benchmarks, yes, but not invisible floating benchmarks.
(A typical response I get from Christians is that I cannot possibly believe this, cannot possibly have thought through it, and could not possibly function in life if I did believe it. But I have held this philosophy all my life. For me, this assumption makes sense of the world. The target is moving if it depends on our culture and philosophical discourse, but the target is invisible if it depends on God. The former seems, to me, more plausible and pragmatically more attainable.)
If I’ve guessed your general objection, we probably have to leave it here because it is a fundamental disagreement and we will not be able to resolve it briefly in the comments section.
2. I described the Euthyphro dilemma: “Do the gods love virtue because it is good, or is virtue good because the gods love it?” You responded: “God doesn’t just love virtue… God IS virtue….God is not a being: He is being itself.” I’m not sure that gets at my main point, though. Suppose I accept your claim. I can rephrase the Euthyphro: “Are we required to be virtuous because virtue is good, or is virtue good because we’re required to be virtuous?” In other words, the problem is: If something is already good, we don’t need a God to command us to do it; and if it is not already good, God’s command can’t make it good. (That’s why I referenced “divine command theory” in that paragraph.) Thus, the Euthyphro suggests that we can be ethical all on our own, and God may be superfluous. Indeed, when you propose that God is identical with “virtue” and “being,” that (to me) makes God look superfluous because in that case “God” is just an alternate name for things for which we already have secular terms.
I also note a potential point of confusion where you say “God IS virtue” (i.e. God is identical with goodness?) while in your first response you said, “God decrees the Moral Law” (i.e. God is distinct from goodness?) Sounds like a new Euthyphro: Does God decree the moral law because God is virtue, or is God virtue because God decrees the moral law?
3. I am not a scholar of the Lord’s Prayer, and I do not take a position on how it should be interpreted linguistically or theologically. I fear the misunderstanding here lies in my own poor phrasing. Lewis said, “It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven,” and I complained, “This is not perfectly clear, since the quoted sentence of the Lord’s Prayer appears to be a petition…not a promise…” I didn’t mean to comment on the prayer itself. I meant to comment on the way it “appears” to me, as Lewis presented it. I was commenting on his presentation skills.
If Lewis meant to address himself to people who already share his understanding of the Lord’s Prayer, he could simply have said that the prayer is “perfectly clear” and then moved on, yes. But if he meant to address himself to a broader audience (including new Christians, skeptics, etc.), then he needed to better explain what he meant. His English quotation is not persuasive to me; what he said is “perfectly clear” is not. After all, it required you to jump in with Greek to clarify. If Lewis meant to persuade me on his own, he didn’t do his job. That is a flaw in his book. (Not a flaw in the Lord’s Prayer.)
4. You suggested that logic/philosophy may not be the best methods to evaluate this book. Fine, but I don’t know how I should evaluate the book? If it will require something like Christian faith to comprehend what Lewis is explaining about his Christian faith, I’m caught in a circle from the get-go. And this book is definitely distributed by the millions to be used as an entry point. (I received a free copy from evangelists on my college campus two decades ago.) That is part of what I critiqued in my original article: the thing that is being distributed does not make sense (or shouldn’t make sense) to large numbers of people. If the reader needs to know a Greek version of the Lord’s Prayer or how the Lord’s Prayer is understood in contemporary churches, then this is an advanced, not an introductory, text, and still less does it make sense that so many millions of copies continue to be sold for this limited purpose.
