In my continuing quest to define the basic unit of wrongness I have gone down many blind avenues. My latest attempt was an extremely sensitive meter to gauge the precise measurement of a single “beck.”

Unfortunately, it got too near a laptop displaying this article about Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert and it went all ‘splody.

Although he also declared that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world, as an aside he argued that only nations that turned away from the Judeo-Christian god have ceased to exist. “No country has ever fallen while it was truly honoring the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” Gohmert said. “So if you were completely areligious, completely atheistic, but you wanted to have a free country, and you wanted to have it safe and protected, then it would sound like — from historical purposes — that it might be a good thing to encourage those who believe in God to keep doing so,” Gohmert said. “Because when a nation’s leaders honor that God, that nation is protected. It’s only when it turns away that it falls.”

How on earth can one man contain so much wrongness? Just to start, the idea that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world doesn’t pass the laugh test. Frankly, I think Judaism’s claim to that title is still pretty good, although there may be some strong contenders among the minority religions in authoritarian countries.

And the claim that no true Christian nation has ever fallen … what can you say but [citation needed]? The first Christian nation is usually said to be Armenia. Located between Rome and Persia, it was pretty much doomed, and it fell both to Persia and then the Arabs. At times it was a vassal state of the Byzantium, the core of Christian Rome, but of course the Byzantine Empire itself fell to the Ottomans.

And finally, the argument that atheists should encourage Christians so that God will not turn away from the country. There’s a very basic aspect of atheism that Gohmert is just not getting.