Citation Needed - Christian Video Games

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Christian video games are a video game genre and a form of Christian media that focus on the narrative and themes of Christian morals and Christianity. And, though not a categorical requirement, they all suck. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

Well, no, Lucinda, I told you if you put a saddle on it, it's gonna hurt us back. We're not gonna tell you if he might see us a cat. I'll talk to you later. I'm at the studio to record citation needed. Well, well, well. Look who it is. If it isn't Mr. Rirun, the recycler himself. What are you guys talking about?

Okay, like you don't know. This week's essay. Obviously. Yeah. It's about Christian video games, but you just did a talk at free flow about Christian video game. You're giving us your research, Levens, man. Oh, okay. Well, first of all, I included a bunch of stuff that wasn't in my talk at free flow. Uh, though technically our essays are much shorter than the free flow talk was plus for that i did slide but when you come to come on e-l i you had a fucking chatbot right your last essay

and he i mean he does he stuff don't fair yeah he's got you guys there no no no no no he's not getting away with this so just so you know no uh... for next time, we'll all be using our conference presentations

for our essay material. Yeah, yeah, you better believe it. Okay, has any of you guys ever given a talk at a conference? Not the point. Okay, fair. A lesson learned. Fine. So what would your talk?

I was actually hoping you would write something for me. Oh, okay. Hello and welcome to Cytacea Leid. The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be jerking your joystick tonight. But other quarter-jockeys are here to ride this digital wave with me. First up, three men who aim to free the world from religion's corner trap.

He, Noah, and Cecil. Yeah, you got a block religion in them. Right, that's key. But I'm seeing you. What you convinced him to join you in mortal combat, you're already. Right. Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. Listen, Christian video game makers are funded by 10% of their audiences income.

Do you give us 10% of your income? No. Jesus Christ. You fucking down. You don't. But you know who gets infinitely closer are patrons who give us 100% more than nothing that's what most of you give us. And that's why abortion is illegal now.

So if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us, he saw a person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event. Will we be talking about today? Today we're going to be talking about Christian video games. And Noah, you limited yourself to a mere seven pages of Christian video game facts, which as someone who saw the research for your talk is some sycophine heroism. Are you ready to dash us upon the cliffs of your notes? I am ready, player one. Okay. Well, given your obsession with old Nintendo's and your job making fun of

Christian stuff, it seems weird to even ask, but I guess we have to get into the essay somehow. So why are we talking about Christian video games? Yeah, so back in March, I did this talk at the Florida Free Thought Conference in Orlando about the history of Christian video games. And ever since then, I've had a lot of people ask if I was going to be posting that talk online or otherwise sharing it. I'm not sorry, but the combination of that demand and me not wanting to do a whole bunch more research Got me to thinking about a perfect topic. This would be for a citation needed essay Yeah, I was gonna use my talk at the Florida for the conference for essay, but nobody even invited me to that Now I should start off clarified my definition here because if you look up Christian video games on Wikipedia No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because you know, Holy Water, they claim the legend of Zelda,

because in the original one of the shields that you could upgrade to had a cross on it. But when I say Christian video games, I mean games that are designed to teach people about the Christian worldview or reinforce Christian beliefs, just having hell imagery or being inspired by Christian mythology isn't enough. Also, we get Tetris too, is just Christian video game. If you flip over the T1, you put it on the I1, that's guys across. Fucking Christian, fuck you. For the first decade or so of the commercial video game history, that's effectively 1972

to 1981. Games existed in two spaces. The majority of the money was in arcade cabinets, but you also had home video game consoles pretty much right away. Now, these are what we call generation one game consoles or dedicated consoles. What that means is that they're not programmable. Whatever game or games, your Gen 1 console played were programmed into it to begin with when you bought it, which means basically that if you were going to design a video game, it

had to appeal to the broadest possible number of people. There was no room in the market for games aimed at a niche audience at this point, but that would start to change in the early 80s with the rise of home computers, democratizing video game design. Man, tells you a lot about your religion when even you have to admit our path to eternal paradise isn't broadly appealing enough. Right. Yeah. Now, I should admit upfront here that there's a bit of a historical black hole when it comes to the earliest computer games. A ton of shit was just being programmed out of somebody's spare bedroom,

copied in their garage, distributed in envelopes at local stores, then shared through rampant piracy, and then reworked until you wound up with the source code of thecs. In other words, a huge percentage of the early computer games are lost. And a lot of what we have is difficult to attribute to a particular programmer company or even year. So it's entirely possible that the first commercially available Christian video game is somewhere in that black hole. But the earliest one we know about comes from 1982 and it was called Bible bites. Uh, coincidentally, also the name of my Christianity themed restaurant that served or derives made with wheat that wasn't planted next to oats. Oh, yeah.

You gotta try them. They're called hot cross buns. They're so good. So Bible bites, that's bites with a Y was originally released for an absolute piece of shit computer called the TRS 80, which was a radio shack branded computer that boasted a whopping four kilobytes of memory yikes and a CPU that clocked in at 1.79 megahertz. Big fan of radio, Shaq. It was a chunker even by the standards of its day, so much so that it was universally known as the trash 80, which makes it kind of the perfect place for the Christian video game industry to start. Yeah, the Kevin Sorbo of computers. Right. Exactly. Right. is. Right. Anyway, so Bible Bites was a collection of what we'd now call mini games, what we then

called games. They had titles like Noah's Ark, the Sermon on the Mount, the Deceptively Promising Moses is Rod. Most of them though were word games, but a few of them were graphical. You could buy them individually or altogether. You could either get them on cassette tape. Wow. We haven't moved on to the cutting edge technology of floppy disks quite yet.

Or you could buy a book that had the source code and you could actually just type it in yourself. Holy shit. So that you could play Hangman with Bible words. Hangman. Okay. If the guy gets crucified when you lose, I think I kind of imagined buying a game so incomplete, you have to code it yourself who made it project red.

Yeah. The video game deep got well done. Thank you. Oh, no, of course, around the same time, we also have the rise of third party software companies for consoles. You can hear all about that on the Atari video game burial episode that we did back in 2020, but suffice to say by 1982 capitalism realized that anybody who wanted to could put together a cheap ass cartridge that played on the Atari 2600 and make a few bucks, even if the game sucked. So naturally, a couple of Christian games showed up. Two of them to be exact, the music machine in 1982 and Red Sea crossing in 1983.

Incidentally, these are two of the most valuable games in the world for Atari collectors. The last time they sold it auction, they sold for five and ten thousand dollars respectively. Yeah, this despite the fact that they were so horrible that it would be pointless to even describe the gameplay. Just imagine generic bad eight-bit game and you've nailed it. So ultimately this anybody who knows how to one and zero can make a game shit had to stop for the industry to survive. So when Nintendo released the Nintendo entertainment system or NES into the American market, they did so with the system in place to try to ensure that only

games approved by Nintendo could play on that system. And in addition to rules about game quality, Nintendo also had this like list of puritanical rules that games had to conform to so as not to piss off British parents. Rules like no profanity, no alcohol, no drug use. And since the Japanese executives weren't about to try to parse what was reverent and what was blasphemous in the minds of American evangelicals, no religious content. Okay, deplatforming works is what I learned. Yeah, right, right. Deplatformers is a great shock. Shows what they know. I believed in Pokemon so much more than I ever believed in God,

like so much right. Yeah. Now, of course, some religious symbolism slipped through, but mostly they were super fucking serious about it. So much so that when a popular duck tails game was brought to the US market from Europe, they re-program the game to take the crosses off the coffins in the more global. Yeah, it likes. But inevitably, Christians looked at the extreme care and intent it was taking not to offend them and called it persecution. Cause,

right, cause like putting crosses into video, and it's yes, that's blasphemous, but taking crosses out of video games is even more blasphemous. So the demanded their own video games, games that promoted their religion and acknowledged the divinity of Christ.

I like that this bit outrage required someone to actually play duck tails on two continents. Like, how are you fucking kidding me? It's before the internet, man. Some asshole had to play in fucking England and then come over here and play it here. And and we demand a 10% tie from screws. Yeah. One 10% of that swimming pool. Come on. Little, little kitty pools

worth of gold coins. Yeah. Now for their part, Nintendo didn't relent, but a third party software company called Color Dreams saw the hole in the market and decided to fill it with third party unauthorized Christian games. So they rebranded as wisdom tree games and they said to work hack and the NES security. Uh, first they needed to find a way around the built in lockout chip, which was tough. Uh,

the best they managed to do is they, they sent a high voltage to the system as it was doing a specification thing. And that would overwhelm the system and allow their games to play sometimes getting wisdom their games to play. Sometimes getting wisdom tree games to work was it was a crap shoot for Nintendo game. Yeah, I was going to say Nintendo's were tough too, just the regular one. So I guess for the wisdom tree, you got to like blow through the shirt and believe like right. And contrition in your heart. Yeah, exactly. And podcast listener, if you're surprised that a Christian company's first move is copyright infringement, you are not familiar with Christian media. Yeah.

No, shit. But so, but even after they did that, they still had to figure out where to sell them. Right. Nintendo had a clause in their vendor's contract that forbade the sale of unauthorized games and selling online wasn't a thing yet. But luckily for wisdom tree, Christians have a weird, stupid parallel universe for their kids that has its own schools and its own museums and its own amusement parks and its own stores.

And Christian bookstores, which would never carry something as simple as authorized Nintendo games. Wow, Pac-Man had ghosts in it. They didn't give a fuck about that clause. And they happily stuck whatever intermittently functional piece of shit games wisdom tree was willing to slap a Christian sheen on to you have to walk around some church basement calling out what you're looking for like you're looking to buy acid and a grateful dead show your late trips. Nugs.

Platform for nugs. Platform for nugs. Shooter. Now, Google's what that just feels like you're lying about. Now, ultimately, they released seven games for the NES and another five for the Gameboy, but there are two in particular that I want to highlight for their awfulness. Well, one is actually a three game combination called Bible adventures that included a Noah's Art game, David and Goliath game that was mostly about finding sheep and was almost indistinguishable from the Noah's Ark game. And a baby Moses game. This is so bad. Where you have to sneak baby Moses past the Pharaohs men by carrying him over your head like he was a fucking vegetable in Super Mario Brothers 2.

And yes, you also within the game through the baby Moses like you throw the vegetables in Super Mario Brothers 2. Amazing. Collectively, Bible adventures was ranked as the 68th worst game of all time by Games Radar and the 19th worst of her by electronic gaming monthly. Yeah, but it's only the 11th worst game where you can throw a baby, according to Heath and Wright's baby throwing quarterly. So what? Now, the other one that I wanted to highlight is an almost impressively uninspired

game called Sunday, fun day, probably the most notorious game in the history of Christian video games. So before their expedient transition to Christianity, this, this company was cranking out half ass games for PC and they were most well known for this game called Menace Beach. Um, now it was just a generic beat him up, but to the extent that it was known, it, it was known for its controversial cutscenes where you're trying to rescue your girlfriend from a gang quick before all her clothes rot off.

So like you're, you're rewarded for beating the level basically was seeing an increasingly naked image of a bitmap chick chain to a wall. Yes, that's the company that found Jesus when there was a bucket. If they made a Christian game today like that, it would be the same scenario, but the person tied up would be Jerry Fowell's pool boy. And grandma's memory of him would be the thing that rots away. I feel like right. Right. Anyway, so they took that game. They swapped out the decreasingly clad girlfriend with a fully dressed Sunday school teacher. They changed the plot from trying to rescue your

girlfriend to trying to make it to Sunday school on time. They made absolutely no effort to explain why gang members were trying to keep you from Sunday school and had you continue to beat them up on your way. And they re-released it as Sunday, fun day and less than anyone mistake their conversion as genuine. I also want to point out that they would later release that very same game in Japan as a full on pornographic game called Miss Peach World. Oh, all right. Well, I've got some googling to do, so why? Stretch Marists, let's take a little break for Apropos of Nothing. Mr. Nintendo, thanks so much for taking the time. My name's not Mr. Nintendo, thanks so much for taking the time.

My name's not Mr. Nintendo. No, no, no need for modesty. Now look, we hear a Christian Bible ink want to know what we can do to lift this silly embargo on religious games. Look, we really appreciate the offer, but we hear it Nintendo have a core set of values that we cannot deviate from. Yeah, and what are those? What are they?

Well, if you must know, our brand is settled around a few franchises. We have an Italian plumber who beats up turtles to get laid. We have a little boy's time traveling adventure where he often dies and has to fix the hellscape that he created by dying in an alternate timeline. And of course, Pet Slay of Fight until one of them passes out through the big spones. We have.

Okay. I see. And honestly, I respect it. Okay. Tell you what, I'll give you some major mentions in Bayonetta. How about that? Who's Bayonetta? She's a witch who uses her powers by losing her clothing for kids. It's... for kids. For kids, of course. And we're back. When we left off, everything Christianity touches got worse and I saw an opening for a seventh podcast.

What happened next now? Okay, so to this point, I feel like I've understated the extent to which Christian games were almost always just thinly veiled re-skinnings of existing shit. Even though the last game I talked about was a literal re-skinning of existing shit. But by and large, Christian parents didn't care about adding anything new. Their demand was all about taking shit out. Sinful shit. So like when Dance Dance Revolution got big, some Christian company came out with dance

praise so that you could have all the same exciting and fun experiences without listening to lustful music like that's the way I like it and kung fu fighting. The same company would a year or so later come out with guitar praise. Okay, but dance dance revolution. How is that not dance dance revelation? Right. So good. Oh, so good. I'm glad that you're on our side, Heath. Your puns and Christian hands would be deadly. Deadly. Deadly, I say.

Anyway, dancing around scorpion was locusts. I play the shit out of that game. So anyway, so the next game I want to highlight was maybe the most blatant re-skinning in the history of Christian games. This game is called Super Noah's Arc 3D. And it also comes to us from Wisdom Tree Games. It's the only unauthorized game ever released for the Super Nintendo. And the way that they got around the lockout chip on that system gives you a great

idea of the level of half-assery that they were willing to stoop to in order to get Super Noah's Arc 3D to play. You had to insert an authorized game into the top of the cartridge and then plug that into your system. Oh, all right. What if we have our games wear a line skin on his head? Then they won't notice they're not real. That's the same vibe as the Christian version of everything.

Yeah. So what they're going for and world's first non-binary cartridge. I am surprised they let that one slip as the goalpost. So in 1992, a dude by the name of John Carmack set off on a long career of redefining video games with a game called Wolfenstein 3D. It is known as the grandfather of first person shooters. It pioneered the concept of shareware as a means of promoting independent games, but it's also all about running around a castle shoot Nazis. So Christians weren't allowed to play it, right?

That's too violent. Plus, we're talking about Gen X Christian. So they have to grow to be terrifyingly sympathetic to Nazism. Okay. So this guy, Carmack went on to make Hogwarts legacy. No, Carmack is a good guy in this one. But the following year, Carmack's company in software came out with the far more popular and far more advanced first person shooter doom. And it was such a leap forward graphically that pretty much immediately Wolfenstein 3D was

antiquated, which made it perfect for wisdom tree games. So they go to it and they're like, hey, can we license the game engine from Wolfenstein and make a Christian version? And it's off what was like, sure, man, knock yourselves out. And so they said about finding the elasiest possible way to Christianize Wolfenstein. Oh, the main hero gets a nose job and starts going by wolf. Just don't see that. Jesus Christ. starts going by wolf just Don't see that low Jesus Christ. No. No.

So the first problem, of course, is that the game is a shooter. Kind of hard to take the violence out of a genre called first person shooter. So what they did is they set it on Noah's Ark and they armed you with the sling shot that you could use to shoot food at rowdy animals. And I guess the food was laced with God magic or whatever, because if you hit them, they would immediately fall asleep and stop causing a ruckus. So instead of running around a castle, shoot Nazis, you ran around an arc, roofing goats. It was more wholesome. Right. Cool. Also, the animal shit just piles up like tetris. So there's like a ticking clock.

And you have like, get done fast. So when Christians try to craft their own games from the ground up, they don't do much better than this. I mean, because like, at least there was a fun game hidden underneath all the wisdom tree half-ass array with superdo is arc 3D. But not so much with the next game I want to talk about, which is called I shit you not. Captain Bible in dome of darkness. So in this absolute treasure of a point and click adventure, you play as Captain Bible. I kept the Bible works for the Bible court, which seems kind of inevitable given his name and rank. Right. I love the lazy writing. This team name has the same name as his hero name.

Welcome to the league of extraordinary Batman. Like what the fuck, man? Oh, oh, she's like, I got some bad news for you about Gotham nights, buddy. Don't turn that one on, okay? I'm trying to talk about one. They were called the Gotham Batman, though. So so the Bible core, as in this game, come across a futuristic city that's been covered over in a dome of darkness and inside evil aliens have stolen everyone's Bibles and started

lying to them about the true path to salvation. So your job, if you choose to accept it, is to infiltrate the dome of darkness, find Bible verses at various computer terminals throughout the city. Apparently, Captain Bible couldn't be bothered to memorize any of those. Why would they put them into computer? Yeah, okay. Not a lot of why. This game doesn't hold up to a lot of why questions.

And then when you come across an alien, the alien will tell you a cyber lie. For example, it might say, well, God would never love an insignificant speck of protoplasm like you. And then you gotta go through all of the Bible verses that you've collected and figure out which one refutes that lie. And then when you do the alien dies. Now, there are two other games I want to talk about before we wrap up.

One of them is from 2006. The other one is from the future. So we're going to start in 2006 with a game based on the left behind novel series. That was an Uber popular post apocalyptic torture porn series in the 90s and 2000s. So in 2006, the publisher decided to cash in with a video game. The game was called left behind eternal forces. And unlike most of its predecessors in the world of Christian video games, this one didn't exactly shy away from violence. It puts you in charge of the tribulation force. That's a group of Christian rebels

in post-rapture New York who are fighting against the antichrist who Heath is very depressed to already know his name to Nikolai Carpathia. That's gonna be a good idea. And your job in the game is to convert the bad guys to Christianity or else kill them. It's like the crusades, but with machine guns. So needless to say, this game stirred up a bit of controversy when it was released.

American atheist called it, quote, a violent Christian video game that promotes religious bigotry and intolerance and quote, and the anti-deformation league criticized its quote, exclusivist religious system against Jews end quote, the game's developers inspired media entertainment argued though that the conversions in the game weren't depicted as forceable, even though your literal only other option was murdering the people and that you actually lose spirit points for resorting to violence and having a low spirit meter will cause allied units to defect or become neutral. So you know, killing everybody who disagrees with you is only supposed to be used occasionally. Oh, okay. But the speed run straight up genocide.

Absoluted. I can't check this out. Yes. Now, as weak as that defense is inspired, tried to legally enforce it. They famously sent cease and desist letters to a bunch of bloggers and online reviewers that talk shit about their game. I want to read you an excerpt from those cease and desist letters. Quote, your organization hosts a website that has information posted about left behind

eternal forces. Unfortunately, there are many statements on your website which appear to be false or misleading. This type of misinformation may cause significant and irreparable harm to left behind video games, Inc. and must be removed. Left behind video games, Inc. generally supports free speech in the media and understands how important it is to have various opinions presented for public consumption. It will not, however, tolerate the publication of information regarding its products that is false or misleading. And quote, so in light of all this controversy, pretty much every major retailer pulled the game from their shelves. So in order to get rid of the gazillion unsolved copies, they thought, hey, you know where

a game about violently changing the religion of people would go over really well, Iraq during the American occupation. So they donated a bunch of unsolved copies that were intended to be included in care packages for American soldiers inevitably dubbed freedom packets given the buzzwords of the day. Um, but luckily ABC news was able to get to the department of defense and time and say, hey, maybe you don't send games where you're supposed to kill or convert all the non-Christians that literally say, praise the Lord, whenever a non-Christian dies within the video game to the Muslim majority country, we're occupying. And that plan was stopped. Oh, maybe it was called God of war crimes. That'd be clever, but not like this. We're not doing it. God of War crimes is what you should have called that. Now, we don't know how much money the developers spent on the game.

So we don't know how much they lost on the game, but it was at least a million dollars. Might have been closer to three million. But despite its miserable commercial failure, the game wound up with three sequels. And the reason why kind of springboards us into the last game that I wanted to highlight. See, for normal video games, the people paying for the development of game B are generally speaking, the people who bought game A, right? You may get some investors here and there, but to do so, you basically got to show them you can make a game that people are willing to buy. Unless you're making a Christian game. In which case you just have to suck or some church

or some Christian philanthropist or whatever into pissing away a couple million bucks in the misguided hope that their fucking grandkids would like Jesus as much as Minecraft if only Jesus had his own video game. And if developers could reliably pull that off in 2006, just imagine how much easier it is in the days of crowdfunding.

And that brings us to our final game, the perpetually upcoming I am Jesus Christ. Ooh, please be as gifts of friendlier simulator. It's so very close. No, this one is a first person Messiah simulator where you play as Jesus. You get to do fun stuff, like get baptized, perform miracles, craft new items

with your carpentry skills. And of course, fight Satan. The prologue is available on steam. And if you just send them a little bit more money, why I'm sure they'll be able to program the rest of the game. And listen, I know I've tossed out a lot of shit your way in this episode, but please do yourself a favor. Seek out the trailer for I.M. Jesus Christ and let me just say in advance, you are welcome. Oh, I feel like there's got to be like the DLC where you beat a fig tree to death.

It's like, it would be like the, the bonus stages in Street Fighter 2, right? But with a fig tree instead of a car. Yeah. It would be like the, the, the bonus stages in Street Fighter II, right? But with a fig tree instead of a car. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, no illusions, what would it be? It's the same thing I learned every goddamn week in gam. I'm in the wrong line of work. Yeah.

And are you ready for the quiz? That I am. All right. No other than dance dance revelation, which of the following was the most obvious idea that was missed by Christian video game companies? Hey, immortal combat. B, the way the truth in the half life. C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C, C trying to destroy it with C, because you know that Cuber is my favorite

classic video game. I'm going to go to the candy crush. Well done. That's correct. All right. Noah, what should I name my atheist video game to get in on our market? Hey, there is no God because of war. Oh, because God of war.

I get God of war. Problem. Yeah. Yeah, the other ones are better. B, are they just cause most. C, Daniel, Daniel, Daneit of thieves. I don't think most people are getting to any of these.

Go ahead. Those are great. These are fantastic. This is the best work I've done in months or D battle toads because there's no way a loving God exists in the same universe as that video. That'll tell us what's great. It was just too fucking hard. I was fucking hard. Jesus. Such a fun game. I'm going with B just cosmos. Camnastic.. See only good one. All right. Here we go No, we learned about a religious crowdfunding for video games. What is the best name for religious crowdfunding? Oh, okay a Christian to go go see Praetrian see

Kick martyr or D I'm going to have to go and see kick-marter it is. Oh, all right. Well, he's, Cecil, Cecil. Yeah. You said kick-marter. So you win. I'm going to have to go and see kick-marter. I'm going to have to go and see kick-marter. I'm going to have to go and see kick-marter.

Because that's fucking brilliant. You are correct. Kick-marter, it is. Oh, all right. Well, he's, Cecil, Cecil. Yeah. Well, you said kick-marter. Oh, all right. Well, he's Cecil. Cecil. Yeah. Well, you said kick martyr.

So you win. Well, I was holding an envelope up to my head and he knew what I was going to say. That's he that's what's in the envelope. It's your wallet. It's me. All right. Well, for Heath Noah Cecilil who's next week and Tom he Cecil says that I Already said

I agreed to be now man on it nice All right, well for he he he and he I'm he well Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then he will be an expert on something else Between now and then you can hear us push back against the many and varied forces of theocracy on our shows God awful movies scathing, cognitive dissonance, the skeptic rat, dear old dads, and dear and de-minus. And if you'd like to help keep the show going,

make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod, or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with me, check out past episodes, give us a list on social media, or check the show notes, be sure to check out citationbod.com.