Do most Christians even know?

I wonder sometimes when I talk to people who identify themselves as Christian whether they even know the sort of things that the fundamentalists are endorsing. While they certainly aren't as dangerous as the extremist Muslims out there, there certainly is the potential within their belief system for them to become dangerous.

For instance, the bottom line with fundamentalists is that it doesn't matter how you live your life. All that really matters is that you confess your sins to Jesus and are "born again." That means that you can eat babies every day for seventy years, and then one day you can repent to Jesus and everything is a wash. Don't believe me? Check out this comic from Jack Chick, a fundamentalist cartoonist. (Click on the panel for the whole thing - but that one panel gets the point across. There's a criminal who goes to heaven, but the good marshall goes to hell because he didn't believe in Da Jeebus.)

Am I crazy to say that this is a potentially dangerous theology? While I don't think that we should try to be good to gain some sort of eternal reward (or avoid an eternal punishment), I can at least see some value in people believing in heaven and hell for the simple sake that it provides motivation to be a good person. With this though, what's the motivation if the bottom line is that it all simply depends on what you believe? (And let's not even get into the fact that this is a pretty screwy interpretation of scripture. I've read Revelation and I know that it says at least once that people will be judged on "their works". It's amazing how Bible believers can pay attention to everything that confirms what they already think is true and totally ignore the stuff that they don't want to be true.)

I also don't think that people are aware of the threat that these fundamentalists pose to science education in this country. While I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of home school or even private schools, I do fear for a generation of kids who are being taught that there's some genuine debate regarding evolution and the age of the Earth. I also have to wonder if your average Christian is even aware of places like the Creation Museum, which purports to be a science museum, yet it shows people with dinosaurs and claims that Noah put T-Rexes on the ark.

I've heard a lot of people say that the average Muslim needs to do his or her part to condemn the actions of the extremists out there. While the Christian extremists don't pose the same sort of a threat, I feel that the average Christian should be more vocal against these people as well - lest they become dangerous. ('Cause it's not like nobody's ever died in the name of Christianity. I sometimes worry that Christianity is a sleeping dragon right now, and when it wakes we'll enter a new dark age.)