Body Language Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

Theological Discourse gets exactly one thing right in this post about "hidden conversations":

My coach always told me that people have are having 2 conversations. The first conversation is the immediate conversation and the second conversation is the hidden conversation. The latter is made up of subtle things, body language, tone of voice, etc.

That's absolutely true. In face to face conversations, most of the information being conveyed is not in the words being spoken, it's in facial expression and body language. I wouldn't really say those things are "subtle", per se, merely unspoken. Most of us are capable of interpreting the unspoken information without thinking about it, but this is where people who are neurologically atypical (i.e., those with autism, those with processing disorders, etc.) run into problems, but that's another post for another site. It's also the reason internet communication can get ugly fast, in that it's difficult to convey sarcasm, and difficult to remember that you can neither see nor hear me, so misinterpretations happen a lot.

Anyway, TD interprets this to mean, well, something entirely unrelated to the complexities of human communication.

The following is a guideline of hidden conversations atheists have.

1. "There's no proof God exists," translates to "I don't know what the word proof means."

See, now that has nothing to do with body language, facial expression or tone of voice. I do know what the word "proof" means, and I have seen no such proof.

2. "There's no evidence God exists," translates to "I don't know what the word evidence means."

See above.

3. "There's no good evidence God exists," translates to "My definition of good(or the definitions I agree with) supersedes all other definitions of good," or "I don't know that good evidence is relative to the person viewing the evidence."

Look, how many times can we go over the definitions of related words? You could have covered this in one sentence.

4. "There's contradictions in the Bible," translates to "I don't know what a contradiction is."

Honey, you must not know what a contradiction is, because there absolutely are contradictions in the Bible. You would have to redefine "contradiction" to the point of absolute meaninglessness to say that any of the contradictions are not contradictions. Really though, it's irrelevant. This is just another Christian telling me that he knows what I think better than I know what I think, and besides being unbelievably arrogant, it's simply not true. I'm fairly certain there is something in the Bible about saying things that aren't true.

And really, what the fuck all do any of the numbered statements have to do with nonverbal communication? Oh, right, nothing. If you're going to segue, at least segue from something vaguely related.

It's funny how accurately you can discern what an atheist doesn't know from the things they claim to know.

It's funny how accurately you can discern exactly how arrogant and ignorant a Christian is from the things they claim to know. (HAHAHAHA Two can play this game!)