Miscommunication

Today, I came to the realization of the applications of miscommunication; how very often they occur and how catastrophic the results can be.

A small example is a button my mother gave me. It says "God doesn't believe in me either. Things even out." I first interpreted this as someone else also not believing in "me", because of the word "either". What I thought it meant was that since god and whoever looked at the button don't "believe" in the person who owns the button, things evened out in the sense that both views don't matter. As you might see, that doesn't make much sense. Later, I reworded it so that it made sense to me: "I don't believe in God. God doesn't believe in me. Things even out." That makes more sense than the original, but again doesn't make any sense at all because how is it possible to know if God doesn't believe in me? Also, if I don't believe in God, how the hell is he supposed to believe in anything if he doesn't exist in my mind?

Anyway, I concluded that it was just meant to be a funny atheist pin, which is appropriate for me. But I still believe that having the word "either" included makes the message quite confusing. My above explanation probably makes no sense either, which leads to another theory: if you try to explain a miscommunication and you are part of that miscommunication, it will become ever more complicated.

This miscommunication, no matter how small, may lead to something as extreme as a war between two countries or something as trivial as a high school breakup. They exist everywhere and happen everyday and most go unnoticed. Which makes you think: how much do we really understand about each other?