Double belonging

That's right. Worship Only One God. Because all other deities are false ones. The One Who Created the universe Is the One True God.

As time went by, that did become the prevailing belief, but Yahweh is a sky god just like the others in the neighboring temples. Kinda like the Norse Odin is the Germanic Woden. Not all the beliefs from different Germanic tribes were like, but they were enough alike that Odin was recognized as Woden.

Most, if not those stories in Judges of massive battles with Canaanites with the ark blazing before the great army never happened beyond minor tribal warfare, per the archeological record. There’s few grave skeletal remains with battle wounds to be found, nor any evidence of fires and ruins caused by war, nor any epigraphic record beyond the Bible.

As far as archaeologists can tell, the Levant coastal and hill tribes coexisted. They’re cultures coming closer together as they intermarried and formed treaties or covenants. Elyon and Yahweh merge and the stories were written down or rewritten later to make Judah/Israel into something grander than it was to compete with their rich trading partners with long histories. There are echos of the original stories in Bible that give this away. 

In Judaic esoteric belief, Yahweh is but one aspect of the Almighty. It is unknown to humankind because there is no way for our minds to understand It. So Yahweh is a necessary conceit. 

all you had to do was say you are sorry to God. You don't even need to make recompense. You can steal, ask for forgiveness, and keep what you stole. That's why Christianity became so popular, it's easy

What Sarge is describing is henotheism. The early Canaanite tribes were always in a cultural flux due the Egyptian influence on one side and the Mesopotamian one the other with differ pagan beliefs waxing and waning. Even so, one good source of civic revenue for these burgeoning Canaanite tribal cities was sponsoring a temple in honor of their local god or gods. Being similar in pagan outlook, these gods were interchangeable and as the most powerful and wealthiest tribe emerged in the 1st m. BC, that tribe got dibs the lucre temple trade and that tribe’s king was usually that god. 

Strict monotheism probably didn’t happen until Persian Empire came in with their highly developed, late Antiquities Zoroastrianism. As the Israelites and Judahites reconstituted themselves as one homogeneous nation and condensed and redacted their holy scriptures to what’s recognizable as the Torah today. It’s the apocalyptic literature that’s not considered literal in Jewish theology that caught the attention of the 1st c. BC Roman Empire oppressed Jews and developed into a heresy of an imminent, revolutionary messiah the Pharisees, Temple Sadducees, and Rome were trying to stamp out at the time. 

As far as most Buddhists are concerned, Jesus is a legitimate spiritual teacher who achieved Nirvana but chooses to remain in existence as a bodhisattva Christians know as the Holy Spirit. If he had a miraculous birth and death, that’s not necessary for his narrative to be affective, but it could’ve happened. So, there is nothing in holding Christian beliefs per se that will prevent a devoted disciple who follows the way of love of the Lord Jesus from obtaining Nirvana, that is, Union with the Godhead. 

Everyone gives me the same line, even my wife said almost exactly the same thing, but it isn't supported by scripture nor is standard in any church to my knowledge.

I assume what happened is Yahweh was initially conceived as one god amongst many. He was gradually assigned functions and attributes of these other gods until he gradually evolved into first the greatest of gods and then the sole god as the other gods became essentially irrelevant. 

Of course, accepting all this doesn't necessarily invalidate monotheism - it can be seen as these tribes coming to an increasing understanding of the true nature of God.

I imagine if history had turned out differently and the followers of a different god prevailed against the followers of Yahweh then that god would have been assigned all the attributes and functions that were assigned to Yahweh and would become essentially identical to our understanding of the Abrahamic God. From such a perspective, the origins of Yahweh are kinda irrelevant. Yahweh is just one of the many influences of what evolved into the Abrahamic God, perhaps no more important than any of the other gods, many of which are completely forgotten.

The Jewish god Yahweh is one of many gods.

The Christian God, and the Muslim Allah are the one and only God.

Which was what I thought was fascinating in my original post... Catholics who double belong as Christian Buddhists have Christian as a noun (who they are, their God, etc), but live with Buddhist principles (no god, but very compatible with Christ's teachings).

Was Jesus influenced by Buddhism?