I’m sure this will be funny to a large portion of the Onion’s audience, the part that doesn’t spend most of their time thinking about religion. Fundamentalists usually don’t read the Onion and will probably never see it. Then there are most of us are, either desensitized to this rhetoric and find satire of it pointless or painfully aware of the battle against anti-intellecutalism and are sick of the building of conter-productive straw men.

You’re right, we don’t need to lower our standards. The actual fundamentalists hold views just as absurd, we don’t need to make up fake ones. There’s plenty of comedy material out there already.