Bart Ehrman

I myself was a fundamentalist, and it took me a long time to be over it. When I was seventeen I attended the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, a bastion of fundamentalism where my fellow students and I believed that the Bible was inerrant in everything it said. There were no mistakes in the Bible of any kind. This is what we were taught and this is what we believed.

- Bart Ehrman (in speech when presented with the Religious Liberty Award by the American Humanist Association)

Bart Ehrman was referenced in a comment yesterday per my citation of a character in What If.*  I have read a few books by this lapsed fundamentalist who traveled the gambit to fundamentalism to agnosticism as seen in God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question-Why We Suffer.  The latter is a basic cry, dealt by various people in different ways.  One interesting book dealt with Peter, Paul and Mary ... you know, the biblical figures.

I discuss Misquoting Jesus here.  Ehrman does a lot of work showing the complexity of interpreting religious texts, particularly when we don't actually have the originals.  It is as if events that take place decades in the past, already obtained secondhand are copied a bunch of times, each copy slightly different than the other one.  We wouldn't quite know what is meant if we had the originals (already flawed), but the end result (even if we use the right translation -- word choice often of particular importance here given the nuances of the faith using them) is particularly opaque.

The resulting lack of clarity can be seen as just how life is or even as on some level more interesting and overall a reason to be careful and humble.  Of course, assurance is another way to go. The same applies to constitutional interpretation and I often see an overlap:

Of course when trying to understand these different points of views we need to engage in the work of interpretation. Contrary to what some people assume, texts don't speak for themselves. They must be interpreted. And this can never be done "objectively," as if we, the readers, were robots; texts are interpreted subjectively by human.

Quoting Ehrman.  Anyways, the reference to Moody in the film concerned the wife being told that when you marry a minister, you should watch for that moment of doubt -- it always comes -- and this is what she thought was occurring when her husband suddenly was acting all strange. Actually, he was suddenly in an alternate reality, living as someone else up to that point, so his sudden rejection of who he was arose for somewhat different reasons.

The comment holds true either way, since doubt arises in any number of ways, and when it involves something of deep importance, it tends to pass.  Not always.  See, Bart Ehrman.

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* I alluded to Kristy Swanson (who plays the wife) having "range" and the link shows a couple things she did in her career for which many viewers of the movie would not appreciate. This is better than the incident where an earlier satiric sex themed video (that few saw) led to a children's show host to lose her job.

Another thing that stood out was during the commentary where the star said a mild expletive.  Surprised they didn't edit that out.