(July 18, 2011 at 1:14 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: I'm a deist. I don't believe Yahweh is God. Any more than you believe Zeus or Allah is God.
You cannot say, "And Yahweh said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel." if Yahweh is not God. Since they are different entities, their names cannot be interchanged so lightly. God is the name of the only god in the Bible. God said that quote, not Yahweh (which I assume is also a god?).
Anyways, when you cherry-picked the verses in Exodus, you came to the wrong conclusion. Israel was in Egypt for a much longer time than 80 or so years; which is nowhere near the time needed to build cities with even 700 people. If what you were saying was true, it would be a gaping hole in Christian history and much fewer people would believe in Christianity. As it stands about 1.1B people are Catholic.
http://www.christnotes.org/commentary.ph...es&b=2&c=1
"As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the LORD said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
Genesis 15:12-16
