Every intelligible discussion, every succesful exhange of ideas, every rational argumentation calls for a shared ground from which to make a point. The old Greeks and St. Thomas Aquinas in his time already made the point. I'm not the one to argue against their judgement here. The western culture and thought relies on those principles.
The question then becomes, where do we draw the limits of intelligible discussion? Some people like to narrow the categories "I will not take the arguments of the theists / atheists as they are profoundly misguided and unintelligible to me". After that the disagreements are solved with a sword (or rockets / smart bombs). As a reaction to this, there has developed a stance that everyone has her/his point of view and that's it. Call it subjectivism if you like.
But there's a void in here.
Subjectivism makes any meaningful discussion pointless.
But the thrive for "objectiviness" on behalf of some particular cultural principles or ideologies (atheist, lutheran, evangelical, catholic, orthodox, Shia, Sunni, ...) leads easily to narrow-mindedness and "the agreement of us" against the others. In the worst case to outward racism and hate, as we have seen too clearly nowadays.
Let's find the common ground from something more basic than ideologies centering around mere religious beliefs?
Just to tease (leaping across a few associative bridges): why should we ask the question what the author meant while writing? Why should we care? For many people of the 21st century Shakespeare's Macbeth is a story that so greatly depicts the horrors of totalitarian states and the problems our century has raised in front of (and with a thrive for) absolute rule and power. Shakespeare could not have thought of these as he lived in the 17th century (if there was the person "Shakespeare" to begin with). Are we wrong about his works now?
Is an author an omnipotent being, able to create meaning into the world like God which we should either understand or fail? Are you a God of your utterances? If all the other people take your utterances in a way X while you yourself have tried to explain them as Y, who is correct: all the others or you alone? (Be honest here!) Can we make a question of someone being right concerning meaning in the first place?