There was nothing invalid about the form of my argument. Murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person. God did that in the OT, or rather it is purported that God did that. Either God did it and committed murder or He didn't. If He did and murder is unjust, then God is unjust. However, God is all-just, so God cannot commit murder; so the OT cannot be correct. You may not find it plausible, but the argument is logically sound.

Yes, but you are thinking of liberty of indifference and not liberty for excellence; and this is why you will find it incoherent and probably downright contradictory to say that people in heaven cannot sin and yet are free. No different than how if you think freedom fundamentally consists in this indifferent ability to choose from contraries you will find it impossible that God is free, let alone perfectly and absolutely free, and yet cannot do evil.

It's why the replies from believers consist mostly of repeating doctrine rather than responding to the inconsistency. To reaffirm the creed is to participate in the truth.

I literally responded with a philosophical account of why God had to sacrifice Himself, devoid of faith, and @Frank ignored it. I understand many laymen do not take this approach and your critique here can be generally valid of those who do not have a robust understanding of their Christian beliefs; but I gave the consistent and rational position that Aquinas would endorse: so this isn't even a niche or unlikely position for the Catholic Church to endorse.

How is that relevant to our discussion? Do you see how your depiction of Christianity was a straw man? That's all I was attempting to argue here.

What would you say the sacrifice of Jesus was meant to accomplish?

I explained this in my responses to you:

Imagine that you knew someone was in debt to you so much money that they never could pay it back. You could absolve them of the debt with the snap of your fingers, but you be being unjust: they deserve to pay that back and you deserve that money, but you are forgoing it to allow someone to be in a condition that they do not deserve out of some motive (perhaps love or kindness). In this case, you would be having mercy on them, but at the expense of being just.

If you want to be just, though, you cannot do this; but if you make them continue to be in debt (to be just) with no way out, then you are not being merciful.

So, can you be both merciful and just? Is there a way to synthesize them? Yes. For example, in this case, you could take the money from a volunteer who is wealthy enough to pay the debt for this person and thereby absolve them of their debt when they don't deserve it (i.e., be merciful) and preserve the proper respect of desert (i.e., be just).

It's not a perfect analogy, but this is what God did.

And:

The death itself is not what fundamentally saves you and I: it is that something of infinite dignity was offered to repay our sins. This could be, in principle, done in various ways.
…
Frank, it isn’t the Christian narrative. According to Christianity, when you sin you offend God and you cannot repay that sin; so God, out of love, offered Himself to repay that debt so that you can repent.

But you didn’t address them. Your view is a straw man of Christianity.

God is all-just and all-merciful; so He has to synthesize the two analogous to the debt example I gave. You seem to think God can just forgo punishment for sins and that is best; but that is mercy at the expense of justice. If the judge absolves a person of a rightful conviction sentence out of mercy, then they have sacrificed justice.

@Frank

Imagine that you knew someone was in debt to you so much money that they never could pay it back. You could absolve them of the debt with the snap of your fingers, but you be being unjust: they deserve to pay that back and you deserve that money, but you are forgoing it to allow someone to be in a condition that they do not deserve out of some motive (perhaps love or kindness). In this case, you would be having mercy on them, but at the expense of being just.

If you want to be just, though, you cannot do this; but if you make them continue to be in debt (to be just) with no way out, then you are not being merciful.

So, can you be both merciful and just? Is there a way to synthesize them? Yes. For example, in this case, you could take the money from a volunteer who is wealthy enough to pay the debt for this person and thereby absolve them of their debt when they don't deserve it (i.e., be merciful) and preserve the proper respect of desert (i.e., be just).

It's not a perfect analogy, but this is what God did.

from His own wrath

God sent His Son out of love so that He can be both just and merciful. God is not wrathful: I don’t know why the OT describes Him that way, but the NT makes it clear He is not.

And apparently this strategy worked in spite of the fact that he didn't actually die 

The death itself is not what fundamentally saves you and I: it is that something of infinite dignity was offered to repay our sins. This could be, in principle, done in various ways.

most people didn't get saved

What do you mean?

How does a person who hasn't had a lobotomy make sense of this?

Why do you have such hostility for Christianity? This seems disingenuine, an ad hominem, and mean.

 Could it be that most Christians throughout history didn't know this is the Christian narrative?

Frank, it isn’t the Christian narrative. According to Christianity, when you sin you offend God and you cannot repay that sin; so God, out of love, offered Himself to repay that debt so that you can repent.

Okay, that's fair. I just wanted to try to impress the idea that the Amalekite culture and the Amalekite religion/cult go hand in hand, and if we want to get into the exegesis we could show that it is specifically the abominations associated with the Amalekites that God is concerned with. The question, "Why the Amalekites?," is something we ought to keep in mind. It would be a significant mistake to assume that this is how God/Israel deals with every people-group

That’s fine by me.

I think it is reasonable to assume that there were Amalekite children and that they were part of the ban.

:up:

In the first place I would want to note that in our Western society which strongly values individualism, the individual is the central agent and the child is often seen to be his own person, so to speak
…
A second consideration is the question of support mechanism.

I am having a hard time parsing your argument. Let me offer some arguments I think might be extractable from your elaboration. I’m going to use loose arguments and I am not intending to put words in your mouth.

Argument from Group Agency

1. A person’s innocence or guilt is determined relative to the group’s innocence or guilt.
2. A person that has done nothing wrong themselves but is a part of a group that is guilty is thereby guilty (just the same).
3. Murder is the direct intentional killing of an innocent person.
4. The Amalekite group was guilty (of relevant crimes to potentially killing them).
5. The Amalekite children had done nothing wrong.
6. The Amalekite children were guilty by association with the Amalekite group (2).
7. Therefore, killing the Amalekite children was not murder.

Is this an argument you would endorse?

Briefly, I would say that I would deny 2. Ethics is person-centric, not group-centric; but then, again, maybe you would rejoin that this is ‘libertarian modernism’.

Argument from Mercy Killing

1. A person that could be mercy killed or left to endure a serious and fatal life (such as leaving them to starve to death because no one can feed them) should be mercy killed.
2. The children of the Amalekites would have been left to starve, because the Israelites lacked the resources to integrate them into their society properly, and inevitably die in insufferable ways.
3. Therefore, the children should have been mercy killed.

Is this an argument you would endorse?

Briefly, I would say this is consequentialistic; and I would deny it on those grounds. Murder is not allowable if letting a person live would result in grave consequences for that person—including insufferable death.

Argument from Evil Cleansing

1. An extremely evil idea deeply rooted in a society, culturally, should be eradicated.
2. Eradicating such an extremely evil idea is infeasible without killing off most of the population.
3. Therefore, one should kill most of the population of a society that has a deeply rooted extremely evil idea.

Is this an argument you would endorse?

Briefly, I would say that this also is consequentialistic at heart. I don’t think it is permissible to do evil in order to eradicate evil.

P.S. The reason you aren't getting a lot of direct answers to your argument in this thread is simply because it is a very difficult argument to address. For that reason I'm not sure whether I will succeed in giving you a satisfactory answer either, but I think these considerations complicate the initial picture quite a bit.

That’s fair, but aren’t you a Christian? I’m curious what you make of these difficult passages: does it affect your faith?

Considering other common forms of death in antiquity, death by flood isn't exactly a bad way to go. Would you also think, e.g., death by tuberculosis or dysentery to be God "murdering?"

Are you confusing an action with an allowance. God is doing the flooding (by willing it); whereas a person with cancer right now was through privations of what God wills—God is not willing it.

It’s the difference between me killing someone and letting them die.

Secondly, if a set of pre-existent rules binds God, then he is not God. Creation (which includes rules) proceeds from God.

God is not bound by rules; but that doesn’t mean He isn’t bound by His nature. His nature is perfectly good which binds Him: the modality of ‘rules’ is irrelevant to that point.

Again, you are taking a divine command theorist approach and this is very flawed. Things are not good merely because God wills them: God has to will them in a way that is good because He is goodness itself—His nature is perfectly good.

Yeah, but don't those seem like highly ad hoc explanations? The Rabbi, granting Chatgpt even got it right, is inventing a new kind of light to explain it when the simpler answer is that the author had no clue how light works OR the author was trying to convey something spiritual.

Does it? It says Noah has his sons when he is 500 years old. His sons are all a century old when the Flood comes, when Noah is aged 600. Noah's sons are the last births mentioned in the text. If one reads this literally, I'm not sure how fair it is to make assumptions about human life cycles at these scales, particularly if one considers the radically different biology that is being suggested elsewhere.

I see your point: upon thinking about it more, I think this is a fair and reasonable rejoinder. I don’t think the great flood mentions or implies there are children and there are plenty of mentioning of abnormal biology.

EDIT: It is worth noting, though, that the lineage part does suggest that they are procreating (instead of God manually creating them), so it's still kind of suspect that there are no children at all. Especially if people are said to be doing immoral things: that usually involves sex.

What are your thoughts on the other two examples I gave in the OP?

There is no "principle or parsimony" for reading historical texts that says: "stick to just one text." Really quite the opposite. We try to confirm things through as many traditions and texts as possible. I am not sure where Rashi got that idea though, if it might have been in an earlier tradition.

What I was referring to is the principle that the simpler explanation that explains the data is the one we should use. I believe this would be used by historians.

The religious view is that God has the right to take and give life as He sees fit.

But, then, murder is not the direct intentional killing of an innocent person. It would have to be defined some other way, and different than it being merely an illegal killing.

I sympathize with your position, since it does seem to me that the OT counts, all else being equal, against God being all-just OR that the OT is not describing God (or potentially divinely inspired).

The point of this OP is to see what people would say who would hold that the OT is divinely inspired

.

Exactly, and most Christians have the Church itself as an interpreter, and its most respected saints as anchors. You have the Church Fathers as an anchor point, and within them the "Universal Fathers" who are doctors of the Roman Catholic Church and also among the most respected saints in the East, e.g. the Capaddocian Fathers, Saint Maximus the Confessor, etc., as well as the Apostolic Fathers who wrote within living memory of the Apostles or those they directly taught.

Islam has a similar set of texts and interpretive system. Evangelical Christianity, as dominant as it is in the Anglophone world due to its influence in the US, is quite unique in the Abrahamic tradition in how it deals with scripture and tradition.

But how are they interpreting it? How do they respond to the things @Hanover said? If you would like to respond to a specific example, then here's one: why does Genesis describe God making light for the earth before the sun?

By your definition, a person would kills an innocent child in society that has not made killing humans, in any way or means, illegal has not committed murder and, most crucially, apparently, has done nothing wrong.

Murder is the unjustified killing of a person: the direct intentional killing of an innocent person.

Moreover, "God being the law" is partially true and partially false. God IS perfect goodness and perfect justice: His commands are not themselves what grounds what is good or just---it is His nature.

So you are right that there is no other being above Him: He is constrained by His own nature to be perfectly good. So my argument is perfectly valid: if God is all-just (because it is in His nature to be all-just and not merely because you are defining arbitrarily God's commands as what defines justice) and murder is unjust, then God cannot commit murder; but God does commit murder in the OT, so that is not God or they got the facts wrong.

Aquinas doesn't think the word "best" makes sense in that context, given the infinite possibilities

I'll have to think about this: maybe if there are an infinite range of possibility then God would have an infinite amount of 'best' worlds He could create. I am not sure.

As noted, the story only mentions men, most of whom are several centuries old.

Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that there were no children on earth during the Flood; but the very previous chapter, 5, outlines in detail the lineage as normal procreation and Noah is said to have three sons in chapter 6.

Also, it is worth mentioning that these kinds of rejoinders, like Rashi’s, seem to fall prey to violating the principle of parsimony. No where in the OT does it suggest remotely that there were no children or that the beasts were shapeshifters: you’d think it would mention that, or at least not mention things which imply the contrary.

With all due respect, I can't seem to follow what your rejoinder is to the arguments I gave in the OP. Can you take one of my three examples from the OP and demonstrate what interpretation you hold of it that is immune to my critique?

I think you are giving me a lot of substantive information on the topic, but I'm having a hard time relating it to the OP.

Bob, I always feel respected by you without you saying it, so no need. Have at it! I hope you see that Inrespect you as well.

:up:

Do you think God is all good and all just?

Yes I do.

Do you think God is not capable of committing evil?

Yes.

Do you think the OT tells history, or it does not?

I don’t know: it seems to be both history in a more literal sense of events, dates, and people and also literary. It’s hard to decipher what was meant to convey a lesson vs. a mere exposition of historical fact; and it becomes dangerously close to confirmation bias, IMHO, with some of the interpretations I’ve heard.

Do you think the Bible ever tells lies to us, purporting to describe events that are fictional as if they were historical?

Well, on the one hand, it facially tells inaccurate information and is not inerrant; however, on the other hand, most of the text I would be referring to can be interpreted as allegorical, metaphorical, etc. Still then, it seems unsuccessful at solving the issues.

For example, the beginning of Genesis outlines the creation of the world prima facie and it blatantly incorrectly states that God created the light that shines on earth before the sun. However, somebody could say that it is metaphorical for God creating the universe. Still then, why would God divinely inspire His message to be conveyed in a manner where it gets facts blatantly wrong like that?

Whether or not the Biblical writers are lying is a separate question; and I would lean towards no. I don’t think the author was intentionally messing up the facts to deceive people.

Do you think God reveals himself to us through the OT or not? If so, is God a historical figure in the OT or the NT or both, or neither?

That’s what I am evaluating and why I started this OP. I believe if God voluntarily creates a world, then He will always have to (1) create the best possible world and (2) freely will to incarnate Himself through hypostatic union as a representative member of the species of any that are persons to save them. I think, and @Leontiskos can correct me on this, this would be a heresy for Christianity of God being forced to always pick the best.

Did Abraham and Moses live and worship the same God whom Jesus called Father and whose Holy Spirit remains with us to this day, or no?

I would find it plausible that Abraham and Moses were real people and worshiped the same God who Jesus called the Father.

So God is good, but the alleged God of the OT is not good, and so the OT is false history of what God did; God didn’t actually do what the OT says God did. That’s what you think.

That’s what I am arguing and what I would find most plausible right now. I don’t have a strong intuition or position on this yet though. The point of this OP is work through my thoughts and see what other people bring to the table for me to digest.

So killing of innocents is bad, but killing of Canaanites is justified, but not killing all Canaanites; God was ok killing some innocent Canannites, but not ok committing genocide of all Canaanites, innocent ones or not. That can be inferred from what you just said here.

I am fine with that assessment. My minor quibble would be that a just war does not entail it is just to have as your end to kill all the adults engaging in evil: a just war entails that you are justified in fighting with them to stop the evil—which should be done with a principle of proportionate response in mind. If I can stop someone from committing child sacrifice without killing them, and this can be done with reasonable safety to myself and others, then that’s what I should do. I would be being disproportionate in my response to the evil by still killing them anyways (unless that is a proportionate punishment, such as capital punishment, for their past sins of sacrificing children).

And the alleged historical God of the OT is not about love, peace, justice, eternal life, goodness, hope, faith, charity, humility, mercy, forgiveness and redemption - but instead, in the OT, alleged God is basically a God of wrath and enforcement of law and demonstration of power, and sometimes evil deeds. We should read the OT to learn lessons, but not as containing any facts.

I see, so you are taking the spiritual approach of interpretation—correct? What lessons are we learning from portraying, according to your own view, God purposefully incorrectly? What do you think about the aspects of the OT that seem to be historical (such as lineages, outlining laws, the people, the places, etc.)?

Is God capable of committing sin or not, and is God a moral agent or not?

God is a moral agent because He is a rational agent that has absolute freedom; but His freedom is supreme freedom which is sometimes referred to as liberty of excellence. He does not have liberty of indifference: the liberal idea of freedom being having the ability to have chosen otherwise.

God is both absolutely free and incapable of sinning. A rational agent that is absolutely unimpeded by anything external and of which has absolute knowledge of the good necessarily will always freely choose to do what is good; and, here’s where I think (@Leontiskos) the heresy maybe smuggling in here, to choose what is best.

If you think the two are incompatible, then Moses and Abraham were only fools; Peter and Paul were the first to know God

But how can you say the God from the OT through the NT is the same God if you acknowledge that the OT portrays God in ways God is not?

Are you saying Jesus was tricking the Jewish people when He upheld all of the law of Moses and referred to the God the Jews knew and lived as Farher?

I think Jesus was, in good faith, referring to himself as related to the Father of the OT; which to me means that your view that God can be portrayed incorrectly for the sake of a spiritual lesson as false. Was he lying about being the Son of God? I doubt it, but I don’t know.

This this getting too long, so I will stop here and let you respond (:

I am ok with granting this, because you are excluding the kinds of people that would not be defectors but would not be meaningfully an Amalekite. I am just being careful to note that, e.g., a disabled person being taken care of by Amalekites would seem to count as an Amalekite in the sense you mean. Are you saying that the correct interpretation of the text is that God was specifically referring to an Amalekite in this strictest sense that would preclude children, disabled people, etc? If so, then how do you explain the fact that God punished Saul for sparing some animals? Doesn't that suggest that God was including everything that lived in the City itself?

It seems like part of your argument is <The OT God told Saul to kill all of the adult Amalekites, even though only some of them were evil>. — Leontiskos

Sort of, but that would be immune to the strongest part of my argument; which involves the children. We could dispute plausbly either way if, for example, there were any healthy adults which could be held to be an Amalekite proper and I am willing to concede, given the seemingly identity relation between being an Amalekate and a part of the cult, that there weren't any. We also could dispute whether or not there were any disabled adults, such as cognitively disabled adults, which would be harder to classify as meaningfully an Amalekate even though they lived with them.

At the end of the day, I emphasize the children, although I understand you are setting that aspect of it aside for a second, because it is really implausible in my mind that there were no Amalekate children and it seems like they would be a part of the ban.

:roll: You obviously don't know what neoplatonism is which is evident from the fact that you can't explain it. I have.

Agreed. @frank brought up the claim and then "justified" it by saying I am clueless. Frank, can you elaborate on what you mean?

Why do you refuse to defend your own position? I outlined mine clearly: can you do the same?

Frank, I've read about neoplatonism. What do you mean by it and how does Plato argue for the Trinity? I don't that happened. Just explain it briefly to me.

To clarify, I am saying that Christianity holds that the OT God is God; but that my OP is objecting by way of an external critique from classical theism to claim that it couldn't be God. Most importantly, I am interested to hear what Christian's think of my critique.

Also, I could make an internal critique that would suffice: if Christ is about love and mercy, then how does that cohere with the OT?

Either way, I think it is an issue Christian have recognized is noteworthy and something they need to respond to.

What do you mean by neoplatonism? I mean any view that adopts but sublates Plato's view.

Aristotle adopted Plato's views but sublated it; and in turn Aquinas did the same with Aristotle. I would consider them both neoplatonists.

Also, do you believe Plato was a Trinitarian? I'm not aware of him believing in that: I thought it arose in classical theism with thinkers like Aquinas who were Christians.

You don't think Aquinas or Aristotle were neo-platonists?!?

This of course leaves unanswered the purpose of suffering not caused by humans, like babies dying in floods.

What you are raising is the problem of evil, which is not relevant to the OP.

The answer to natural evil is that you need a world where there are regularties of behavior of the environment for anything’s good to be realized. I can’t live a virtueous life if the floor randomly turns into TNT once a week. You need natural laws to allow for the good of anything at all; and that necessarily allows for natural evil.

 If you say we have the free will to commit atrocity because without it the world would be lesser, you'll have to commit to the idea the free will we are deprived of (like the choice to fly like a bird) is an acceptable limitation.

I am talking about freedom to live in accord with one’s nature: not the nature of something else. It isn’t good for a human to be able to organically fly: it’s not in our essence.

Why was Pharaoh"s free will imposed upon (hardened his heart) but not Hitler's?

Yes, this is a fair Biblical objection; but this is another example of exactly what my OP is arguing. It seems like God in the OT is not really God.

I don't place particular significance on love with God. It's overly anthropomorphic and reductive and it de-emphasizes doing as opposed to believing.

Well, that’s a big problem; as love of God is love of love itself: It is to orientate one’s will towards what is perfectly good. If you reject that, then you do not want what is perfectly good for anything.

 I'll just point out that the centrality of love to God is idiosyncratic to Christianity and not a necessary primary component of theism.

I am not arguing from Christianity here. In this life, if you don’t love God, then you don’t love love itself or goodness itself. If you don’t love that, then you aren’t orientated towards what is good: that hurts you and everything around you.

I see. Can you respond, then, to the three examples I gave and explain how they are allegories and what they are allegories about? I find this implausible for, e.g., Exodus where they are outlining rules. Rules are not usually meant metaphorically or allegorically.

Neoplatonism is a type of monism, so everything is God

I don’t think it is a form of monism. Aristotle definitely wasn’t a pantheist nor was Aquinas.

It is precisely the religion that is to be wiped out (although there was no distinction between the culture and the religion, because they were the same thing).
…
Among other things, what this means is that if all of the Amalekites abandoned their Amalekite religion, they would no longer be Amalekites, and they would not have to be killed

I was not aware of that, and that’s fine as long as we agree then that:

1. Not all people who lived in the culture of the Amalekites were Amalekites, since an Amalekite is a religious affiliation and those who lack the capacity or choose not to engage in it were not be properly affiliated. To iron man this, I would be thinking of children and disabled people that were “Amalekites” but not because they have properly been affiliated with the cultic rites but because they simply live among them.

2. As far as my understanding goes of the passage I quoted in the OP, God commanded them to wipe out the entire city or cities that the Amalekites lived; so this would seem to include the children, disabled people, people who couldn’t leave but completely disagreed with the practices, and animals.

For now, I am leaving out the objection about animals, though, and we can focus on the children if you would like. I find it implausible that no one in an entire city had a cognitive disability (perhaps they always sacrificed those people?), a person that disagrees with the cult but lacks the means to escape, or were a child.

Are we still on the same page? (I realize I still haven't gotten to children yet. :razz:)

I think so! My only concern is that we are interpreting the texts as only fighting with those adults engaging in the cult but I don’t find that plausible in the text so far.

EDIT:

My worry is that, analogously, we are noting that it is a just war to invade the Nazis but also conceding that the invasion was done in a manner intending to kill all the women, children, disabled, and animals to wipe out the german ethnic group out. It seems like a just war has certain rules of engagement.

The evidence we seek to evaluate in determining how an all-good God commanded the killing of children, will only be found in spirit

With all due respect, this seems like a non-answer that sidesteps the discussion. Is your rebuttle to the OP that we cannot know why God did evil, but that it is justified because you are biased towards God?

“therefore God has done evil in the OT” we are biased against the premise “God is all good and would never do evil.”

No. The OP demonstrates in a non-biased way that God cannot do what the OT purports God did. A bias is a prejudice that is irrational and not based in reason, evidence, and logic: I am not doing that in the OP.

 I know that God is all-good. I am biased in favor of God.

Is there any evidence of what is being purported as God’s doing that is evil that would tip the scales for you and make you question if the purported history of God was really history of God?

So when I see horrible acts in the OT leading me to conclude “God is doing evil” I immediately think something is wrong with my reasoning and my conclusions and my understanding of the OT, because God can never sin.

This is what the OP is getting you to question:

1. Genocide is evil.
2. The OT purports God did genocide.
3. Therefore, either the OT was wrong or genocide is not evil.

Your response seems invalid. You are saying: “God can’t do evil and I am biased towards that, so I am going to believe that whatever God does is good”.

However, this isn’t a response to the argument (summarized above). You either think Genocide is always evil and the OT purports that God did it or you don’t. If you do, then you have to bite the bullet and accept that either OT was wrong or genocide is not always evil.

Likewise, you could object to the 2 and give a historical account of what the passages really meant and how it didn’t portray genocide; but saying “God always does good” doesn’t help further the conversation: I agree God cannot do wrong, and that’s why I don’t think the OT is factually accurate.

This idea occurred to me as a part of an argument that God cannot be a utilitarian:
Consider something with a small quantity of intrinsic goodness, maybe for the utilitarian the pleasure of smelling a rose, or for those of us with a more metaphysical idea of goodness, a hydrogen atom or a sugar molecule. Whatever it is, call it a "unit" of goodness. If one of these is good, two of them would be better, although not necessarily twice as good. And three would be better than two. This seems to go on without limit: for any N, N+1 units of goodness are better than N units. So there is no maximum amount of goodness that God could create, just as there is no largest integer. But utilitarianism requires us to cause the maximum amount of good possible. Therefore God cannot be a utilitarian.

I commend your cleverness and ingenuity here; but I think this is fallacious. Goodness is not quanitified over like an atom: it isn’t a concrete being but, rather, a property that concrete beings can have.

Think of it this way. Imagine we asked ourselves: what does it mean to be most perfectly circular? Your argument here is essentially in response: imagine we thought of circularity like it can be split into one basic unit-atom and that utilitarianism is true, then we would never be able to create something that is perfectly circular..

But circularity is a property and cannot be thought of as a unit like this. A perfectly circular thing is entirely metaphysically possible in isolation; and God, analogously, is a perfectly good thing.

 Now when you talk about a "best ordering to creation" or a best "ordering of things", are you talking about one thing or many things?

I am talking about more than one real being and how they would be ordered. One can order them relative to any principle; but I am looking at the principle of ordering them relative to what is perfectly good—which is God Himself.

I will provide some quotes when I have time.

I never denied the existence of good and evil: I noted that goodness is real and evil is not real. Evil is the privation of what is good: so it exists, but is not a member of reality. It is a lacking of goodness; just like how darkness is not real but light is.

So if a child is on fire and I have a fire extinguisher, it's ok for me to withhold help? Just stand there and let her scream? That seems moral to you?

What we are talking about is akin to whether it is morally permissible to create a world where it is possible for a child to get lit on fire or not; and I would say that it is.

To answer your question, which is completely separate and disanalogous, I think one has a legal right to withhold help all else being equal because no citizen qua citizen has the duty to rescue another. Morally speaking, I think it would be immoral not use the fire extinguisher all else being equal because it is trivial for you to do and their live is in danger. If you were to strengthen the risk on your end, though, I would say you are permitted to withhold help (e.g., if you would have to rescue them from a burning building).

Likewise, I was not saying that allowing evil is always permissible. I was saying that they are morally evaluated differently.

I agree with that assessment so far. It's the killing of innocents that my OP is objecting to: I recognize that the Canaanites were doing horrible things and a war against them is justified. However, that doesn't justify purposely attempting to genocide the people in their entirety.

perhaps Plato would perceive God/the divine as unchangeable? 

As far as I know, for Plato God is the One which is unchangeable as a Platonic Form.

 As @Count Timothy von Icarus mentioned, God can be bargained with.

CC: @Count Timothy von Icarus

God cannot and is not bargained with in the sense you mean—not even if what Timothy was mentioning. God already knows what someone who ‘persuaded’ Him is going to say: that entails it was a part of His plan to say one thing initially and change His mind later.

Do you disagree then that there is no theological answer for Auschwitz?

I am absolutely disagreeing. The quote you gave serves only as a poetic line (even if Elie meant it as more). It's an emotion response, and rightly so, to a horror.

God allowing human evil is necessary in order for us to have free will; and we need that to choose Him. This does allow, then, for humans to commit atrocities against each other.

Do you think it is better to love God because He makes you; or love God because you love God?

Origen seems to be arguing that given Christ as love and mercy that the Old Testament has to be primarily spiritual lessons and not conveying historical events. However, most of the events we have some reliable historical evidence that they at least happened to some extent.

Also, didn't the Apostles also take the OT to be giving historical facts alongside spiritual facts? It seems like a hard pill to swallow to reject the literality of the OT outright.

Also, how does this address the three examples I gave? Are you saying you would hold that the great flood did not happen but was an analogy for something else?

But how would you respond to the three examples I gave in the OP?

Anyhow, if you treat God as a person, or as something like a very powerful, magical alien, then even the Binding of Isaac will seem very troubling indeed.

The OP doesn't treat God as a 'magical alien': it treats God as God in the classical theistic sense---the neo-platonic sense.