I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.
Temptation. Like most religious words, that one’s been banalized and reduced from its original meaning. It means literally a trial or a test. A moment in your life when you have a choice to be faithful or not.
Today, that’s like faithful to a diet or a spouse, to a virtue or an ideal. But the original sense was to be tested in your faith to God. Something Job-ian – no matter what life throws at you, you stay the course.
But temptation is secondarily related to allurement or seduction to sin. And here we’re into a less popular usage. Nobody likes to think in terms of “can’t” and “don’t” anymore, do they? “Who says I can’t!”, goes the language of modernity. “Who are you to tell me what’s right and wrong?”
These are tricky waters. “You can’t do that!” has been used to control and restrict by those wanting to remain in power, for sure. But is there something to this obligation aspect of temptation that deserves a more careful consideration?
A Study of Temptation, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.