Boise Ed: “Taking the wings seems to imply accepting that you’re dead. The free Camaro leaves me with no idea at all.”
Which reminds me of something I’ve thought about: the religious concept of eternity. Christians can imagine heaven as a place, but not a real place. It sits outside the dimensions of length, width, and depth. So why shouldn’t it sit outside the realm of time, as well?
Comics I Don't Understand 
The gentleman on the left has died and has just arrived at the gates of heaven, only to find that Saint Peter (here in his alter ego “Monty Hall”) is offering him (at least) two separate doors, each with a corresponding angelic accessory. However, as befitting for a benevolent Saint, Peter is kind enough to point out that the traditional plumed garb would definitely be more practical for his future afterlife than the seductive, but utterly terrestrial motorcar.
This will be a far more serious answer to the last question than you might expect, but yes, you are right, many Christians consider the afterlife as occurring outside the current time-space continuum. This is a bit of my research area, but perhaps the best proponent of this in the last century was the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner. http://targuman.org/2015/01/14/emil-brunner-on-spontaneous-resurrection/
Even the final verse of “Amazing Grace”, written a couple of centuries ago, understands the timelessness of heaven:
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun
Don’t forget to sing that verse to the tune of “Gilligan’s Island”.
Thanks, Targuman, that is illuminating.
And eternity glimpsed in a three-hour tour!
@Powers: or maybe sing Gilligan’s Island to the tune of Amazing Grace…
With all due respect to Emil Brunner, the best explanation as to how the afterlife sits outside our space-time comes from the Good Place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFm9ClqlGuo&ab_channel=NBC
How refreshing! Thanks for the reminder of how good The Good Place was.
Oh, Powers, thanks for that. I hate getting Amazing Grace stuck in my head, but I’m fine with a Gilligan earworm.
So, if the big guy is doing a Monty Hall, the little guy still has a choice. He can either transfer to the cloud world or stay on Earth with the car. Pretty easy choice to me, but the big guy recommends choosing otherwise. Choosing to die seems like a pretty good definition of suicide.
“Common meter” and “Ballad meter” (very similar) are used in many songs and poems. A good bit of Emily Dickensen’s work can be sung to such tunes. Many examples are found here:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CommonMeter
Oh you can’t get to Heaven (Oh you can’t get to Heaven)
In a limousine (In a limousine)
‘Cause the Lord don’t sell (‘Cause the Lord don’t sell)
No gasoline! (No gasoline!)
I don’t see that he gets the option to stay on Earth with the car – it’s just which accessory he gets in Heaven.
@ Boise Ed – Even if he gets to stay on Earth with the car, he’s still post-mortem. The best he could hope for is playing an angelic KITT in a rebooted version of “Knight Rider” (with Chevrolet as the primary sponsor, replacing Pontiac).
I once did a talent show act of “Variations on Amazing Grace”. The tunes I chose were Gilligan’s Island of course, Mr. Ed, Dennis the Menace, California Girls, Joy to the World, House of the Rising Sun, Both Sides Now and Can’t Buy Me Love (the verse). But of course with Gilligan’s Island you have to add “a three hour tour” after the first verse.
Mark H – Sounds interesting. I have to ask as I am tone deaf and often cannot tell one song from another – I am presuming that the none of these songs sound anything like Amazing Grace.
How bad am I at recognizing songs which do not have lyrics being sung? Several years ago husband decided I needed to learn to recognize a certain 18th century song which was considered to be a American colonial anthem back then (NOT Yankee Doodle). We would be at some reenactment event and he would ask me “what is this song” and I would make a wrong guess. I finally figured out that he would only ask me this when this song played (song title missing from my head, but not a common song today to know) so whenever he asked me this and 18th century music was playing I said that it was this song. He was so happy and excited that he had taught me to recognize this song. Then one day he asked me, I said it was this song – and it was some other song he thought I would recognize – CAUGHT!
Then there is the disagreement when I say that the “Bonnie Blue Flag” (Southern Civil War song) is the same music as McNamara’s Band.
Of course if lyrics are sung I know which lyrics go with which song – this is when performed without lyrics.
It seems like the meter for those are pretty close in the verses, but not the chorus.
I should have included the Wikipedia links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bonnie_Blue_Flag#Complete_lyrics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara%27s_Band#Lyrics
I thought the Lord was supposed to buy you a Mercedes-Benz?
Anyway – words of one song to the tune of another is a regular round on a very long-running radio comedy show here.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=words+of+one+song+to+the+tune+of+another
Waaaayy back in 1973, while drinking at a bar during the Toronto world science fiction convention, a fellow sf fan and I got into a thing about singing Heinlein’s song “The Green Hills of Earth” to increasingly improbable tunes: “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” and especially “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead” were among the more memorable results.