I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

All of us, if we’ve lived a little, have had to contend with the lure of temptation. From the mundane, “Just one more piece of chocolate cake,” to the come on of a cold beer when you’ve got a drinking problem, to the more serious attractions to violence and crime, we all know the experience of that voice in our ear.

Our modern scientific perspective prefers evidence-based interventions as solutions, leading us to explain away vice and bad habits as weakness, upbringing, chemical imbalance, even genetic disposition. We seldom in our modern world even think of putting temptation down to influence from nefarious spirits. Reason over superstition would read the promotional literature for the modern point of view.

But are we missing something in excluding the theological view? After all, Jesus warned us time and again of our unhealthy subservience to demons, and perhaps we should listen more carefully to that advice.

Man’s Greatest Enemy, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.