I am a born again, Bible thumping, conservative theist, a difficult position to defend on this forum. I take particular pride in being able to successfully give the good reasons why my beliefs are such as these are. I find great comfort in giving support to believers who can not express their belief as forceful and convincing as I can.
Psychologically, I am very content and am without anxiety that I might be in error. I know what is real and what is not real. My faith gives me real peace in looking to the future. What Christ said is true, seek the truth and you will find it, find the truth and it will make you free. I am very happy with my lifestyle and content with life as it is. My belief system has made all this possible.
This thread is not a place for you to offer criticism of another belief system but it is a place to prise the virtues of your own system whatever that system is.
Atheism isn't really a belief system so it will have no place in my comment here, but as a humanist I find great joys in working towards a better future as a fallible being that has to work for it.
"Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime" is one of the principles my girlfriend and I have taken to heart. That isn't to say that we don't offer fish when we have them -- every year we bring last year's hoodies and jackets to the homeless community center in town and sometimes I buy some food and she volunteers in the kitchen -- but there's nothing quite like the feeling of truly getting someone on their feet by volunteering and contributing to work-based rehab programs that try to get homeless folks into temporary housing with job programs so they can accomplish a home and food on the table from their own two hands.
Other than the obvious altruistic side of humanism I enjoy the fact that in such a belief system (unless you have some other belief like some versions of theism or karma or something) all of your failures and successes are your own. You don't get to pass off your failures on something else but rather accept that they are yours and attempt to learn from them -- but you also take credit for success when you've done well.
From the secular humanist standpoint mankind is a mess as it always has been -- wars, ignorance, hatred, etc. It's also mankind's fault that such things are the case. But the really neat thing is that we can also take credit for what we've accomplished. We conquered smallpox, we built a worldwide system of instant communication, we stood on the moon. Some of us have learned to share what we possess with the less fortunate and not to hoard overmuch. Every time we get to know somebody well and we think "that's such a great person," it's a credit to humanity that such a good individual was able to rise to that level.
It may be more modest to simply attribute successes to the handiwork of gods, but I strongly disagree with the standpoints of some religions that hold humans to be inherently wicked, twisted creatures that would sooner stab you in the back than give you a bit of food. I think it does a disservice to the wonderful human beings that do exist.
