The 'Charlie Charlie Challenge' and Teenage Yearning for Supernatural Encounters

[cbayer]

http://religiondispatches.org/the-charlie-charlie-challenge-and-teenage-yearning-for-supernatural-encounters/

BY JOSEPH LAYCOCK JUNE 15, 2015


Photo by Cathleen Falsani for Religion Dispatches.

In May, four girls at a Columbian high school experienced a supernatural encounter so profound they had to be taken to the emergency room in an ambulance.

The girls had been playing a game called the “Charlie Charlie challenge” in which teenagers use two precariously balanced pencils to conjure an ambiguous entity named “Charlie.” Players ask Charlie questions and Charlie answers by moving a pencil to point at one of four answers written on a sheet of paper.

Around Memorial Day weekend, the game went viral on Twitter with the hashtag #CharlieCharliechallenge appearing more than two million times in less than a week. Charlie has been spinning pencils throughout the Americas and even as far away as Palestine. Numerous videos of the game show shrieking teenagers flee the room as soon as the pencil begins to move.

Religious authorities, psychologists, and new media experts have all stepped forward to explain the phenomenon. Last week, HNGN raised the alarm that this is the “new Slenderman craze.”

more at link

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. How convenient that every single direction of spin gives an answer.

I bet if old 'Charlie' only had answers that corresponded to maybe 10% of the circle, he'd not bother to answer 90% of questions...

[cbayer]

2. Hmmm….

Since i think the kids really control it, I would wonder if he wouldn't answer even if 90% of the circle were empty.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. some people here claim that belief in supernatural bullshit is just as valid

as disbelief in supernatural bullshit.* Demons controlling the game is, according to those people, just as valid a hypothesis as "the kids really control it". That is the point of the RCC - the kids think they are controlling it, but in reality DEMONS are manipulating the souls of these kids, and even the gullible, like you in this case, are fooled into thinking it is just a harmless game. And some people here would claim that this nonsense theory of demonic possession is valid.



* for example: not believing in the fairies at the bottom of the garden is as legitimate as believing in the fairies

[AtheistCrusader]

3. Hey did you know, there's this VHS tape, and if you watch it, 7 days later you die.

[DetlefK]

5. Step 1: Lean forward towards the pencils. Step 2: Breathe heavily. Step 3: They move.

[cbayer]

6. When I was their age, it was ouija.

Pretty much the same thing, but adolescents love this stuff.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. And in the photo, the 'answer' would always be 'yes', wouldn't it?

The balanced pencil can touch down at the point or eraser, and that's all I can see could be taken as an 'answer'. Or can breathing spin it round???

Oooh - I watched the video, and it does spin quite easily.

[cbayer]

8. No, it's a little more complicated than that

The pencils start out aligned with the lines and on neither yes nor no.