I think my previous comment takes win, place and show in the awful writing olympics . . . I just read it and I'm not even sure what I was trying to say 
I understood it fine, and thought the writing was good.
I meant to comment on this:
Very interesting, and I think you've hit on something very important regarding God's nature, and how all the laws in scripture, and even all the wrath in scripture, flow from it. (as a side note, I'm reminded of Lewis' description of the love of the angels in Perelandra being confused with ferocity).
I intended on saying something about how the Old Testament wrath throws a wrench in my argument. I know that it does flow from Love, I'm just not sure how. It's a mystery, and one I struggle with.
Yes, I agree that it is a struggle. And there's plenty of wrath in the NT too (see Revelation).
I fall back on Isaiah 55:9. I think being a parent has helped me come to peace about it as well. Not that there's much comparison, but I'm sure to a 2 year old, a parent's "wrath" (because they tried to touch the hot stove and were jerked away and got their hand slapped) can be stupefying too. Not that there's much comparison, of course, but I think the effect on the two year old is similar to the mystery we feel. I also think, somehow, that the temporary nature of earthly suffering (and by "temporary", I am not gearing down the awfulness of it, just pointing out that earthly suffering, though it be felt intensely in a human for decades, for instance, doesn't last forever) is also something very hard for us to understand because we can't understand eternity, and, though we pay lip-service to "life is a vapor", we feel very thickly engaged in the temporal. Then, of course, there is the subject of eternal suffering, which is the hardest of all. I find myself wanting so badly to be an annihilationist, but I'm not sure scripture supports that either. But, again, I think I see in that another aspect of my lower understanding: I don't understand the heinous nature of sin, and how even temporal sins mar eternity, because - just as I don't have a real understanding of eternity, I don't have anything close to an understanding of what being sinless is. The closest we've ever been touched by either eternity or sinlessness is the Incarnation. And that we can only see through a glass, darkly.
Very interesting, and I think you've hit on something very important regarding God's nature, and how all the laws in scripture, and even all the wrath in scripture, flow from it. (as a side note, I'm reminded of Lewis' description of the love of the angels in Perelandra being confused with ferocity).
I read the Edge article. Interesting. I realize it's a matter of perspective, but one perhaps conscious but I hope unintended barrier the New Atheists have put up that makes it hard for people of my ilk to be sympathetic to them is the arrogance of the words they use to describe their movement. "Reality-based", "Free thinkers", "Champions of rational thinking". To coin one of the few philosophical terms I know, there is a lot of petitio principii in the movement.