The Onion, the wildly popular satirical newspaper and website, is often hilarious. It is as often offensive.

On occasion, it's also profound.

Let me point you to an example of the last. In this article, The Onion completely eviscerates the intellectual pretensions of the "New Atheist," by which I mean the acolytes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. (Caution: the title of the article is pure Onion offensiveness.)

These folks don't argue that believers are wrong; they argue that religion makes matters -- and people -- worse.

For example, Doug Kamin, the fictional subject of this fictional piece. He says he had always dismissed the activities that occur within Christian churches as "hysterical" and "cult-like."

That's why he was recently so surprised by the music he heard emanating from a black choir in the church near his home. That sound and those songs have him questioning his beliefs.

It's a great piece -- indeed, I would go so far as to call it significant. That's true not just because of its genius (the last line is one of the finest, most nuanced pieces of satire since Swift), but also because the Onion appeals greatly to the young, particularly those with plenty of schooling. And it smacks them right in the kisser with a startling bit of truth, a truth that's not often heard within their milieu. Furthermore, it does so in the most effective way possible: by making fun of their pretensions to intellectualism.

I should point out that the article doesn't insult atheists or atheism per se. Rather, it makes fun of those who believe Christians are hateful, their beliefs are "cult-like," and their intellectual vision is too narrow.

It will surprise no one who knows anything about human behavior that what these militant atheists see in others -- that is, members of the other tribe -- reflects precisely those failures of character that they themselves have in spades.

Psychologists call it projecting. Herman Hesse put it more artfully: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”