Meaning of Meaning

Ambiguity, selective retention, and misleading paraphrasal combine to give believers great influence on the meaning of their religion. But, for raw, semantic power, none of these tools rivals the deployment of metaphor and allegory. In a single stroke, this can obliterate a text's literal meaning and replace it with something radically different.
~ from The Evolution of God by Robert Wright ~

Boiled down to its simplest terms, Wright is stating the obvious: religious thought changes from generation to generation and even person to person!

Whenever I hear a fundamentalist of ANY religion say "we" need to return to the original understanding of a particular passage from a holy book, it makes me laugh. These holy books, by and large, were written in antiquity. We rarely know who the actual authors are or much of anything about them. As far as I know, we have no original manuscripts. Consequently, this call to return to the original meaning of this or that is a non-starter, at best.

What such individuals REALLY mean is that they want certain portions of their doctrine to reflect what someone else -- at some point in history -- said or wrote a good deal of time after the fact. More importantly, implicit in this call for the original understanding is that they desire for current doctrine to reflect their OWN opinion on the matter!