"...a thing given for our benefit?" 

"...dying?"

"There's a reason this doctrine is currently politically unpopular." 

"Is it 'cause it's dumb?"

"I don't like to think what it says about our civilization that it took fifteen hundred years for most people to accept the fact that dying is suboptimal." 

"Earth actually has this problem too but mostly because people believe in an afterlife."

"Some of our traditionalists do. There's a strain of orthodox theology which holds that we shall have a place in the remaking of the world after its destruction in the final battle. Then again, these are the same people who insist that the sun is a glowing golden fruit." 

"...ours is an enormous distant ball of fire."

"Ours might be one of the greater Maiar, we're not entirely sure.  One gets the sense that the whole thing was rather haphazard." 

"I mean, from the sound of it, if a Maia really wanted to be a fruit too..."

He laughs. "The more powerful ones tend to make more sense, if the tales can be believed." 

"Huh, why would that be?"

"I'm not sure. We might be doing too much work with the word "power," the quality in question seems to be a combination of ability to influence the world and - scope, I suppose, or breadth. The Avaloi are constrained by their natures, the lesser as well as the greater, and the ones whose natures encompass more and more sophisticated goals more greatly resemble us. That's one theory, at least." 

"Interesting."

"It would explain why they've historically had so much trouble with concepts like incentives or contingent circumstances. A Vala is the being which can carry out the set of actions defined by its nature, there's no conditionality there." 

"...if they don't do all of the things they can ever do at all times constantly there's some circumstance at work."

"They probably don't perceive time as linear." 

"And certainly don't have free will." 

"What do you mean by that?"

"There's a divine plan. They can't act outside it. Uh, everything I'm saying here assumes that our primary accounts of their origin and subsequent actions are not fictional, which is admittedly somewhat tenuous, but it's not like scholars have anything else to go off of." 

"I understand. Are there supposed to be ways for anyone to act outside of a divine plan? Seems like that would make it less planny."

"Mortals can, ostensibly, but if everyone else is supposed to be following a specific track that doesn't really make sense." 

"Yes, you'd walk up to one and say, 'how are you?' and they'd say 'yes'."

"It might mean that they can only respond in one particular way to any given set of circumstances? But it's not clear how that'd be different from ordinary causality."