Faith & Spirit Quote by Al Goldstein

Goldstein’s line is a provocation dressed up as a handshake. By yoking philosophy and religion to the same blunt ambition - “to find cause and effect” - he strips both of their prestige and rebrands them as competing explanatory machines. Coming from a publisher whose fame rode on transgression and confrontation, the intent reads less like bridge-building and more like a dare: if both camps are chasing the same thing, why do they posture as opposites?

The phrasing is tellingly mechanical. “Attempt” concedes failure; “man” universalizes while also sounding dated and deliberately unsentimental. Cause-and-effect is the language of engineering, not revelation. That choice quietly demotes religion from sacred truth to a human technology for making the world feel legible. Philosophy gets the same treatment: not wisdom, but troubleshooting. Goldstein’s subtext is anti-mystique. He’s less interested in what people believe than in why they need belief-structures at all: to domesticate randomness, to turn suffering into a storyline, to make consequences feel deserved.

Context matters: late-20th-century America was a culture of loud moral certainty colliding with equally loud secular skepticism, and Goldstein made a career poking at the hypocrisy in that collision. The quote flatters neither side. It suggests the real rivalry isn’t truth versus faith, but brand differentiation. Both offer causality, comfort, and control; the fight is over who gets to certify the explanation.