“You’ll find more wisdom in here than you will in there,” the older gentleman said. He attempted to hand me a pocket-sized New Testament re-done for the latest generation with a flashy green cover and abstract graphics reminiscent of splashed paint.

At first I thought they were school administrators – older gentlemen standing outside the school, chatting with one another early in the morning. Then I saw the boxes and how they approached passing students, attempting to hand out their shiny books, and I knew they were some strain of evangelical.

It begs the question: why the animosity? Why approach college students and claim that religion is better than education? I’m not singling out that particular gentleman, his group or even his religion. The idea that ignorance for the sake of faith is a good thing has taken root in certain segments of our society, just as the notion that religion is a sign of ignorance has taken root on the other side of the aisle.

The straw men we create – ignorant country Republicans versus metrosexual hipster liberals – do nothing but add hatred to the already divisive subjects of religion and politics.

Certainly anyone seeking a balanced, happy life would desire both knowledge of the world from an empirical source and enlightenment from more spiritual directions. Most of the great minds of history have been at least somewhat religious. Darwin was religious and studied for a while to become an Anglican clergyman. Luminaries such as Edison, Einstein and Franklin were all deists, believing in the existence of a higher power without making assertions about specifics.

Some of us with a more scientific bent see the beauty and simplicity of the more fundamental laws we discover as evidence of a greater cosmic harmony. Euler’s identity, relativity, the golden ratio and fractals all represent the beauty that emerges from the laws of the universe, not as we know them, but as they actually are. If there is a higher power, I cannot imagine it wants us to walk the world in ignorance, eyes closed to the profound world it has wrought.

Take a moment. Breathe. Enjoy the beauty of pollen floating in the breeze. Notice how it resembles the flow of stars in the Milky Way, how the phenomenon of particle motion creates effects similar to those of gravity. Think about those people on the other side of the aisle, how we are all made of the same thing.

Whether you call it star stuff or primordial mud, we are all, fundamentally, the same.