No, JS did not use a stone in a hat to translate the BoM. He didn't use golden plates either. He didn't translate anything. He made it all up, with the help of Oliver and Sidney and View of the Hebrews and The Late War and his family Bible. If he used a rock in a hat it was only to put on a good show for an audience. The rock did not transmit any sort of information about anything.

The fact of the matter is that the Book of Mormon is not nearly as impressive as faithful Mormons believe it to be.

Thank you.

Rock+Hat= Absolutely Nothing

At least give a spoiler alert before you blurt out how the movie ends.

Enjoying the movie requires a really intense suspension of disbelief by the audience, so that the ending will come as an extremely thrilling unexpected twist...you know...like the "Sixth Sense" movie or "The Others".

Or like the movie "Primal Fear" (Richard Gere, Ed Norton)

I wouldn't be surprised if some scene like the ending of Primal Fear actually happened.

Emma's been suspecting that Joe has been lying for some time. But Joe keeps trying to gaslight her. Then one day she comes into the room with a bundle of cheap tin roofing tiles.

"Look what I found Joseph! I was dusting around your 'golden plates' under the cloth, being careful not to peek lest I be zapped by God, as you warned me a hundred times. But then I bumped the table by accident and they fell off. Tin sheets. Not gold. What do you have to say for yourself, Mr. Prophet guy?"

Joe then starts a slow clap...clap...clap...clap.

"Well, look at you, Emma! Aren't you the clever girl!? Now you've been out there telling all your friends about our golden plates and how special you are being married to a prophet. You've even gotten many of them to give donations to our 'sacred work.' What are you going to do about it now? May I suggest that you just keep your little mouth shut and enjoy the ride?"

The only problem wuth your story is that Emma went with Joseph the night they STOLE a horse and wagon to get the plates.

The church totally forgets these small details.

Emma was also one of the scribes.

She was in on everything.

+1

For example, if one were to believe that David Whitmer, Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery were somehow persuaded by Joseph Smith to sincerely believe that they had seen them there golden plates with their "spiritual eyes"...why not Emma too. She could have been just as deluded as the other guys.

Or...it could be that they all were in on the fraud from the earliest stages of their close cooperation with Joe.

If that was the case, I think the scenario is still funny. But instead of Emma, I would have to maybe have a neighbor kid who came into the house and accidentally bumped the table.

"Gee, Mr. Smith! These look like the same tin roofing sheets that were in my Uncle Wally's barn. What's going on Mr. Smith?"

I wonder what her motivation would have been.

I wonder what she would have expected to gain from it.

Did she just believe in Joseph Smith and want to be a faithful wife?

I believe the movie "Grease" is an adaptation of Emma's story...

I'm curious, people.

How is the JS BOM translation depicted in the temples and visitors centers and in the church publications?

Did they re-do the panorama in the SLC Mormon visitors' center? I'm almost curious enough to go there, and see what they have come up with--but the experience would be too torturous for me, with my PTSD.

There was also a picture of the Uninethumb attached to a breast plate, that JS was wearing. What ever happened to that?????

Urine Thumb. Two stones, not one stone, one for each eye, mounted like eyeglasses, but not over the ears. The clear stones were attached at the chest with a vest of armor...yikes, I'm gaslighting myself!

What happened to the breastplate and stones? Were they taken back up into Heaven?

What happened to the cockamamy story? What happened to the illustrations?

Did I dream up all of this? (Cue Twilight Zone theme)

it looks like they've deleted the illustrations that they previously had (you know, the one where Joe is carefully examining the golden pages and Ollie is taking notes...no cloth covering, no hat, no magic rock.) But if you dig around in the "gospel art" collection you can still find this one:

https://www.lds.org/media-library/images/joseph-smith-translating-mormon-parson-153741?lang=eng

(That curtain between Joe and Ollie is so ridiculous. Like, why would it be important to keep Ollie from seeing Joe staring at the golden plates? Makes no sense at all.)



Meanwhile our friends at FAIR (the biggest site for LDS defenders of the faith) are apparently embracing the holy hat and sacred stone:

https://www.fairmormon.org/blog/2015/04/30/artwork-of-joseph-smith-translating-the-book-of-mormon

You can google "Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon" and get lots of the old disingenuous pictures. Our buddy looks so studious, so sincere in those paintings!

I got this.

https://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2017-11-0120-seer-stones-and-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon?category=church-history-topics&lang=eng

If you are looking for the real, dedicated, studious, sincere, diligent Prophet (#realjosephsmith), feast your eyes on these:

https://www.google.com/search?q=joseph+smith+translating+the+book+of+mormon&client=firefox-b-1-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjN6Na_8c3gAhXO-lQKHT1eCLkQ_AUIDigB&biw=1440&bih=725

that were intended to be used in conjunction with our rehearsed spiels (euphemistically called "discussions") on various topics.

IIRC, the flipchart illustration for the translation of the Book of Mormon back then was always one of those that had Ollie and Joe sitting together at a table, with no curtain between them and the golden plates opened up in front of Joe.

IOW, the lease accurate portrayal of all was the one they chose to put into the official missionary flipchart.

Why would they do such a thing?

My favorite.

https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/sites/default/files/knowhy-img/2017/2/extra/translation/emma-scribe.jpg

Just the two of them. They can make Mormonism if they try, Just the two of them Emma and Joe.

Thanks for the link Elder Berry. Seeing this on the LDS.org website brings back memories from the early 1970s when I was told that the rock in the hat was an anti-Mormon lie.

anti-Mormons or apostates if they had come out with that exact same video content in the 1970s or 1980s. At a minimum, you would never have seen it on the official website of the Church. You would only have seen those older illustrations where Joe looks like he's directly reading from the golden plates like some professor of ancient languages.

I know right?

I wanted to see this in their most recent mythologizing of the bringing forth their Book of Mormon. They still don't do their rock in the hat trick to try and convert people. This is only for Mormon consumption.

He looks like he's puking into his hat, not reading words from a glowing rock. Puking would be much more believable. If LDS had said he puked in the hat and the chunks formed the translated words, it wouldn't be any harder to believe than the rock story.

"cheap tin roof tiles" Lololol

New Utah Ben & Jerry’s flavors:
Tin roof plate sundae
Rock in hat road

"If he used a rock in a hat it was only to put on a good show for an audience. The rock did not transmit any sort of information about anything."

Apologists have really twisted the minds of believers on this one. Bottom line is that words do not appear on a rock. Today, anyone who would think that they do should be considered having a screw loose. So what have the apologists done? They suggest that a smartphone screen is difficult to see in bright sunlight and the rock was no different for Joseph Smith which is why he placed it in a hat. With Mormonism and apologists, the show goes on and the deception continues.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/21/2019 03:47AM by mikemitchell.

If it was necessary to put a smartphone in a hat to be able to read the screen, I don’t think smartphones would be as popular as they are.

Too bad 19th century god didn’t have the technology of 21st century Apple or Samsung.

That method would be believable in a climate of 19th century spiritualism. But even if it worked, it couldn’t have produced a work that’s such an obvious rip-off of existing material.

didn't have a six-foot tall night-light in his room named Angel Moroni.

There's no way that didn't happen.

Whenever I've witnessed Mormons, both online and in person, twist themselves into knots trying to explain away or justify anything related to the BoM, two words come to mind: Occam's Razor.

Once you've identified and applied the most obvious assumption, that Joseph Smith made it all up as he went along, all remaining questions answer themselves, and without the need for tortured suppositions and twisted rationales.

A real true believer explained it to me this way:
The old pictures of Joseph sitting at a table with the gold plates was "milk" for the members. The apostles understood that it wasn't until recently that the members were ready for the "meat" of the rock in a hat truth of the translation.
Now it all makes sense. Right?

Yeah, Mormons are now ready for the "meat" of JS using the stone in a hat.

Since the membership is now so spiritually mature, I think the Q15 should publish the material in all church manuals and put paintings of that scene in the entryway of all chapels. They are ready for meat.

Give them meat.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yeah, Mormons are now ready for the "meat"...
>
> Give them meat.

Give them meat and
They will BEAT IT!

For the doors...

trope have never actually thought about what they are saying long enough (i.e. less than 2 minutes) to realize that "milk before meat" is nothing more than a euphemism that means "lies before truth."

Putting it through the de-euphemizer filter, these are the kinds of things they are actually saying:

"We lie to people who aren't ready to hear the truth. Our leaders tell lies to the whole world if they don't think anyone in the world is ready to hear the truth. If you think somebody is not ready to hear the truth, you should lie to them. It's okay to lie to an entire generation of people if you have some concern that they would react negatively to the truth."