Do you believe that being born again ("regeneration") is the result of the Spirit of God taking up residence within one (which is what I take you to be referring to as "spiritual baptism"), or is it the cause of the Spirit of God taking up residence.
In other words, do WE generate valid faith, or does God (the Spirit of God) generate it within us, fully valid? (The amount of faith is another question, not related to its validity).
Do you not think God set out to destroy Nineveh in 40 days? If not, why did He tell them He was going to destroy them in 40 days? Does He have to lie to get them to repent?
It was not a lie. It was a threat. And, indeed, if they had not repented, he would have destroyed them. (By the way, if he had not intended that they repent, why would he go to all that trouble to send Jonah in the precise way that he did?
Correct, God did not set out to redeem all mankind, but He is not happy about the result that all mankind will not be saved.
That's a side issue. I'm not saying he's happy that most will perish.
Are you saying God is not capable of making us entirely free to choose without being caused/compelled to do so?
No. I'm saying that it is a logically self-contradictory notion. (Nobody but God is entirely free). So why would he even consider it? It's not that he can't. It's that it is a non-thing.
If one chooses to repent, from a corrupt spirit, is it not still a valid choice to repent, even if the power to accomplish perfectly it is lacking? Were the people of Nineveh then not really repentant, and God's mercy not the right response, since it was a corrupt and faulty repentance?
The story of Nineveh and Jonah is not about salvation, by the way, so it is not the same sort of repentance. I can go to the fridge to get cream cheese for my bagel, go to the living room where my bagel is, and when I open the cream cheese, it has gray hair growing in it. I repent of my course of action. I go back to the kitchen for something else. The people of Nineveh were wicked, God demanded they change their ways or else. This is not repentance concerning their sinfulness. It is simple repentance of what they were doing. Would you claim they loved God after that repentance? It was still corrupt. But, at least, and for a time, they stopped what they were doing.
So God can't make a being that can make a free choice. God can't do it at all, since only He is the first cause?
Define free choice. Uncaused choice? That makes no sense. Only God chooses, uncaused to do so. If you like, we can into the details of that. Can you show me how anything happens uncaused to do so? Only God is uncaused.
Why not? What prevents God from making a person that can then reject His will? Yet you are saying that no one can reject God's will--it is impossible for God to make such a creature.
Does the capability of rejecting God's commands, and even God's offer of forgiveness and salvation, imply free will? Demonstrate to me that there is anything we do entirely spontaneously. For starters: Is there anything we do that we don't most want to do at that instant of decision?
Which means that no one ever has acted against God's will, right? So everyone, for all time, has been completely within the will of God, and therefore God punishes people for doing His will, exactly as He wants them to do.
Here and above, you consider "God's will" as only one thing. The implication is that God fully intended that we all be holy as he is holy; yet, somehow, only Christ Jesus has been able to do that.
The law —all of it God's will—was given to demonstrate our sin and our need for him, because we are unable to obey it perfectly, and so we deserve death. We need his mercy. Even you don't believe that is all that his will is. He also wills for things to happen quite apart from his law. And those things are a little harder to know. So there are at least two things that are called/considered the will of God. The one thing is not the same as the other. If you think God never intended for Lucifer to rebel and Adam to sin, then why did he bother to make us? He made us to be the Bride of Christ, the Body of Christ, the Children of God, the Dwelling Place of God, his People with Him in a way the angels can never be. And THAT would not happen, but for Redemption.
So everyone has acted against his command (his revealed will), but none of us can ruin his plans (his hidden will). He doesn't fly by the seat of his pants to accomplish some general end. Read the prophets where repeatedly God used foreign kings to punish Israel —even refers to one of them as a tool— and then punishes them for doing so. They were not obeying. They were only accomplishing what God had planned for them to do. Do you think that Satan will not have to pay for what he did to Job? Yet God put him up to it, fully intending that that beautiful book would be read by his people.
This animation is going to include the events from the beginning of chapter 19, the parts where they decorate the tree and play in the snow. 
