Are Christians really saved by faith alone?

The first twenty-five years of my life, I was a Protestant. I attended all kinds of different denominations, but they all believed that Christians are saved by accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Once you have accepted Jesus into your heart, you can never lose your salvation, no matter how unChristianly you live. Some people tried to explain to me that having faith means you will live a Christian life, but living it is open to interpretation.


Because the Prostestants believed that they were saved for all eternity from their sins, they acted any way they wanted. In those churches, the only rule that you had to follow was to agree with everything your leader said. Other than that, you could treat people any way you wanted to. If someone disagreed with you, you could call them names. If you didn't like someone's personality, you can snub them. Nobody will say anything to you because that is judging you or expecting all Christians to be perfect. There were always a ton of arguments going on in the churches. People would get mad about something (usually it was kind of petty) and leave.


What was really bad, in my last church, was that I was encouraged to attend a Bible study or a Sunday School class. Every single class that I attended nobody got along with the leader as well as the other people in the class. Of course these classes eventually disbanded. It got so bad that I felt like I was wasting my time 'fellowshipping' with these so called Christians, and I stopped attending the classes and Bible studies. There were so many arguments that we didn't learn anything anyway. After dealing with these people for so long, when someone told me that he was a Christian, I assumed that they really meant jerk.

Christians saved by faith alone makes no sense to me. If Adolf Hitler accepted Jesus as his personal savior once before he killed six million people, he would go to heaven for all eternity. While an atheist who spent his life in the peace corp, would go to hell for all eternity. If God is truly a just God, how can that be fair? Of course the people from my previous churches answer was that we all deserve to go to hell because we have all sinned. It still doesn't answer my question.