Remember, folks, even though they know it’s wrong, they still believe it’s True.
I’ve long suspected that if the WTS was really backed into a corner and its survival was on the line, they’d try something like this as a Hail Mary to provoke the world into some kind of “endgame attack” (as per Freddy Franz’s old Cold War-centric eschatology) in the hopes that God would bail them out with the Big A…
…and if it didn’t work… well…
…authoritarian regimes have always opted to crash-and-burn rather than reform, yield, or concede.
And honestly, I suspect that (even though they’d never say so out loud) if they can’t be “God’s Exclusive Earthly Organization”, they’d rather be nothing.