Are you sure you’re really the Devil and not someone else with the same name? - Keith Laumer

I wanted to tell him that all lives are the same length when viewed from the foreshortened perspective of death, and that life, like music, requires no meaning but only a certain symmetry.

Don’t go female on me now. We don’t have time for nonsense.

It's a failing of your culture, Foster said, that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You're too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principal to all 'established facts.'