Last week, NASA announced that its scientists had discovered evidence that water lies beneath the surface of the planet Mars. Peter Berger reflects on the link between religion and our fascination with the possibility of life on other planets:

Contemplating the night sky full of stars probably led individuals to a sense of both awe and vulnerability even in ancient times—say, some Israelite resting alone for a quiet moment in the clear desert air on the endless journey [from Egypt] to the Holy Land. I don’t think it is an oversimplification to say that all religion is an attempt to answer the question of whether we insignificant beings are alone in the universe. Alleged answers then come, in innumerable versions, asserting that no, we are not alone, and that there is an order of meaning that encompasses the distant stars and our own rather pitiful lives.

But modern science has vastly (indeed “astronomically”) expanded our perception of the star-filled sky—millions and millions of galaxies expanding or contracting, with a strange counter-world of “dark matter,” operating by laws that are increasingly unimaginable and incomprehensible. And now come along some astronomers—mind you, sober scientists, not initiates of some mystical doctrine—who claim that there is actual empirical evidence of not just the immense universe of the galaxies that our telescopes explore, but of a possibly infinite number of parallel universes operating by laws that we cannot imagine in our wildest dreams.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.