People "understand" contradictions all the time. See: the Trinity.
See I don't understand why Christians think the trinity is a contradiction. "God is one person, composed of three other persons." makes as much sense as "The China brain is one person, composed of a billion people" or "a subset is a set that is part of another set". In programming, it's easy to create an object that belongs to class X while also having component parts that belong to class X.
This is a thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. The previous thread is at close to 500 comments.