Fun with numbers

I usually don't post my comments on other people's blogs over here, but this time I was so damn clever, I just had to pat myself in the back by posting it here.

Over at Atrios he posts this quotation from David Limbaugh:

IN 1776, 99.8% OF THE PEOPLE IN AMERICA WERE PROFESSED CHRISTIANS

Atrios says that this is blatantly false, but that's just not true, as I mentioned in the comments:

No, no, this is technically correct. You see, it's like in set theory you have the empty set, and you can say whatever you want about elements of the empty set and it will be correct, since the empty set has no elements because it's empty. Same thing here. At some point in 1776, say January 15, there was no Declaration of Independence, hence America didn't exist and therefore had a population of 0. And of those 0 people, a whopping 99.8% were professed Christians! You cannot deny the technical accuracy of this claim.

Ah the powers of math serve me once again.