Religions are surviving over centuries... that is correct. "Surviving" does not, in itself, indicate a current condition as "are" does. After all, you can say that "After the Titanic sank, surviving passengers found themselves in frigid waters" which is correct and does not mean that the passengers are still alive.
Fundamentalists exist, sure, but they are hardly the majority. How many people are not out and about on the Sabbath? If you are looking at how societies will react, you need to look at majorities. I mean, there are still people who think we did not go to the moon... should we be concerned with their reaction as well? Discussing why so many people do believe the Bible is literal would be an interesting pursuit, but has little bearing on this topic. There are religions beside Christianity; most people of faith, I would imagine based on off the top of my head calculations, are not Christian.
You can state that there are enough beheadings and burnt bodies to support your supposition as fact... How so exactly? Perhaps in the past, but now? There are plenty of churches, synagogues and various other temples where I live but I haven't heard of any beheadings lately and all the burnt bodies seem to be in exploding meth labs. If you are going to judge religion by the way it acted 500 years ago, best view science with the same lens. I also would suggest that you may want to investigate how much of the violence you attribute to religion was political in origin with religion used as a support. Science has its problems with that as well... such as the scientific support for the inferiority of other ethnic groups. By and large, science has progressed past that point, true, but so has religion.
All I am suggesting is that perhaps religion is not so rigid as many would have us believe and that, in fact, many assumptions as to the human reaction to the extraterrestrial are worth re-examining.
