High Councilman bore his testimony that he knew JS did indeed translate the BoM by looking in a hat and reading the words that appeared on a rock. Yes that is what he said plus it only took 3 months.

The Church should have stuck with he looked at the plates when he was translating. When the speaker said he read the words off a rock it sounded so weird and Unbelievable.

Anyone else have a similar reaction when they heard this from the pulpit.

An ordinary person would have been whisked off the stage by a shepherd's crook.

My thought as well.

According to Dieter, a smart phone is like a flat rock you keep in your pocket. It seems to have similar magic to a seer stone. By that rationale, which would sound especially good coming from Leslie Neilson, a rock in a hat makes sense.

The hat story is also a lie.

Exactly. He didn't pull it out of a hat. He pulled it from somewhere else.

Spoiler Alert Dave. I know everything else was false but come on, the hat thing rings true.

...whether he was looking in a hat or squinting up his own fundament.

Well witness for many years until it wasn't.

Well it was for many years till it wasn't.

A TBM neighbor explained that 'the leaders' have always known about the Rock in the Hat but it's only been recently that the common members were ready to hear about it. Milk before meat and all that.

Sometimes they take the meat away and substitute powdered milk —or nothing at all. There were many meaty things taught when I was a kid in the '50s and 60's. Then the church was silent on them (and, of course, not because those doctrines and historical facts had become embarrassing, no no). So when people these days drag one of those things out of hiding we get the old milk-before-meat canard.

The church now has two official conflicting narratives. The peeprock version is becoming the new normal, but they still have the old story in the POGP itself, at the end, right after JS-History. It's the Cowdery footnote that begins:

"These were days never to be forgotten — to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven, awakened the utmost gratitude of this bosom! Day after day I continued, uninterrupted, to write from his mouth, as he translated with the Urim and Thummim, or, as the Nephites would have said, 'Interpreters,' the history or record called 'The Book of Mormon.'"

It's a direct contradiction. Cowdery was clearly asserting that JS possessed Nephite translation devices (plural), and the Nephites were never claimed by the church to have or use a peepstone.

But I guess they don't teach that anymore.

Maybe they’re both true!!

Remember, with ghawd all things are possible.

If ghawd wanted to, he could make a tortilla big enough to burrito the whole earth.

was never spoken from the pulpit during my time in the LDS church (I was about 38 when I left and I'm 64 now). That would have been a shock.

Oh my goodness gracious
200 years and they still can't get their story straight! could that mean their story is questionable?

What could it mean? Don't you have a theory about this one as well?

Sounds like powdered milk before powdered texturized vegetable protein meat substitute.

Kind of distressing that God with his glowing rock was less that 200 years ahead of humans making smartphones, that run circles around rocks in hats. You'd think the Grand Poobah of The Entire Universe would have a better engineering department than that.