Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your hosts for today John Delin.

We are knee deep or waist deep in an amazing series on Mormon Stories podcast called LDS Discussions with Mike from a website by the same name LDS Discussions.com. Hey Mike.

Hey everybody. Thanks so much for joining us today. It's so this series is just taking caught storm. It's taking storm. Yeah, like you know, I feel like I feel like a broken record, but I just I hope it's helpful for people that are kind of in that point where they're trying to kind of understand these issues maybe in a little bit more detail then like say the CS letter.

And in a way, maybe that incorporates both you know the critical approach and the apologetic approach and like you know we've talked about in previous episodes. It's obviously not going to cover everything but it gives an overview.

I think and within each episode they build on each other to hopefully give a broader context to all of these topics. So as we get further along, it's going to make a lot more sense.

And if we just kind of covered them without going through this process of trying to do it in kind of a chronological manner. Yeah.

Yep. By my count were 14 episodes in really quickly. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. I want to state our intentions. Our intentions are not to harm the Mormon church.

They're not to take people out of the LDS church. They're not to destroy faith in the LDS church. The overwhelming mission of this series and a more mysterious is what we call informed consent.

We just believe that everyone who is either investigating the LDS church or as a member of it deserves to understand the truth claims and then to make informed decisions. So that's our intention.

I will also just really briefly say we're getting some mixed feedback. We love your feedback. Many viewers saying that they like the panel. They like Harado. They like Jen. They like Nemo. They like me being a part of the discussion. Many people like a more extensive discussion.

And many people do want us to not go too fast and to have points in the conversation where we summarize. So we're getting a lot of that feedback and we're getting some feedback that's like John, please don't summarize. Just let Mike just do his thing and stay as quiet as possible.

And we don't need a lot of contributions and all I'm going to say is we're listening to both and we're going to try our best to find a balance between the two, but we also encourage you to use the speed feature on your podcast app or on YouTube where you speed things up if you want to go faster or you slow things down if you want to slow things down.

And on YouTube, we're putting jump points in or time codes where once we've covered one of the slides, it's easy for you to jump either through the forward arrow or through clicking to jump to the next point and the next point in the next point.

If you're feeling like we're going to slow and of course you can always rewind if you feel like we're going to fast. All right. So today the topic is sermon on the mount in the book of Mormon. We've alluded to this or even talked about it more extensively in past episodes.

I'm pretty sure we covered this at least in the anachronisms episode. Is that right Mike?

Yeah, I think we covered this in the anachronisms episode. And I think we also covered it in the episode on the King James Bible and the book of Mormon just because this is a really important kind of illustration to show how Joseph Smith is pulling material in and then kind of making changes to work within the book of Mormon.

And it's a really good indicator from like a critical perspective as to how we did it. And so a lot of times we always say like how could Joseph Smith have done it. And these are the these are the kind of the incidents within the book of Mormon that you can look at and go, this is an example where we can kind of see where he's starting with.

And how he makes changes and how it fits in the book of Mormon and that allows us again from like a critical perspective when you're not starting with the conclusion to say this is how he's creating material and you know as David Bakquay would say actualizing it to the book of Mormon to try to make sense for them.

But it also leaves his fingerprints all over the text to tell us that he is going to ultimately be the author of the book of Mormon.

Okay. And yet you feel like this this sermon on the mount in the King James you know King James version sermon of the mount in the book of Mormon is so important that it kind of merits its own drill down. And so that's what today is going to be.

Yeah. And real quick, if you don't mind our last episode on the Tower of Babel and we had talked about the Jaredite stones and how they end up being a Nephite the Nephite interpreters and you had mentioned that you weren't sure if that was like an official position.

And I tried to look a sense that episode to see and I have found a lot of references indicating they are. I don't know if it's like an official church position.

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