Most personally convincing reasons you don't believe.

[vorlon13]

To be honest it really scares me when people do stuff like that... argue the truth of one thing when its contradiction is right there in front of them essentially on the same page. It doesn't even seem like ignorance but rather a wilful act of stubborn defiance... like saying 'I know it's there but I will never admit it'. It just freaks me out.

It is frightening. It's watching someone turn their own intelligence against itself.

After practicing polygamy for a while (even as the Book of Mormon prohibits it) the LDS poobahs (Joe and the inner circle, so to speak) decided they needed some rules and guidelines.

Rather than just rely on a specific one time revelation from God on the matter (and really, after years of changing shit willy nilly, why would they suddenly start doing it that way?) (even though then as now, they claim that is precisely how they do do it) the matter went in to negotiation.

The starting point (and actually how it was presented to everyone else) was to copy the Old Testament rules precisely.  Well, suddenly there is a problem, several in the Mormon hierarchy either wanted to or were already married to sisters, and/or mother's and daughters, which the OT clearly prohibits.  So there is some back and forth how to manage their take on polygamy, and it is entirely all about what the men wanted, with no consideration for the wives (real and potential) or for anything God might (supposedly) have ordained on the topic, and also of no concern, was what the supposed rules for it that were presented to the flock and to the world at large regardless of how they were actually going to do it.

So we saw decades of Mormon contrivance, befuddlement, and lying on just how their version of polygamy was set up, how it worked, and what the actual rules were.

And realize, absolutely none of this chicanery would have occurred in any plausible incarnation of an actual One True Church, even had the deity in charge of that one actually desired it for his believers, as obvious as this 'Religion 101' lesson is to everyone else, it eluded the combined intellectual grasp of all the Mormons behind their polygamous skullduggery.   Particularly in regards to doing it the way they did, and then FUCKING DOCUMENTING IT FOR POSTERITY.

They couldn't be bothered with managing their religion with even a glance at how an actual One True Faith would, and compounding their foolishness, they didn't realize, they at the very, very least, needed to announce they had done it that way regardless of how they had, so that their fucking believers (and critics, LOL) wouldn't have in evidence the smoking gun of their prevarications.