Instead, tell them about how your faith has brought you joy, how it has brought you contentment, how it has stirred your soul, how it has made you a better person.
Better by far than telling them, though, is to show them through your actions. Let them see how this was the right thing for you, and may be for them, too. Don't hide your beliefs under a bushel, but don't treat your faith as a prima facie case as to why they should believe, too. And don't simply say, "Being a Christian (or whatever) has made lots of folks better people." Demonstrate it with yourself, in talking about who you were and in showing who you are.
If you can, it's a hugely effective, very personal argument for most people; if you can't — well, maybe you better work on that, first.
It's not automatic. Folks aren't going to automatically drop to their knees and accept Jesus as their personal savior just because you held the door open for them, or spent Superbowl Sunday working in a soup kitchen, or something like that. It takes time to influence in this way. It might not happen today, or tomorrow. It might be years, and long after the other person isn't around you any more — but if your example was a good one, they will remember it.
That's how you persuade. That's how you lead. That's how you bring people to God (or Allah or the Buddha or whatever belief system, religious or otherwise, you want to bring them to).
The alternative is to get into arguments with them, and, assuming you don't spoil your case with doltitude like the below, it will all eventually boil down to "God told me so, so it must be true."
To which one can expect the retort, "Nuh-uh."
To be followed by "Uh-huh," "Nuh-uh," "Uh-huh," and pretty soon everyone is sounding — well, childish. Which hardly brings glory on whatever faith you're touting.
The nice thing about this approach is that you don't even have to be actively proselytizing for it to work. If the tree is known by its fruits (or whatever parallel metaphor you want to use), then being a good tree is good thing in and of itself, and if it demonstrates something that brings people to the faith, then all the better, right?
This May Be the Worst Argument Ever Made for Why You Should Believe in God
Personally, I happen to be of the belief that one cannot save oneself – or, in other words, God chooses you; you do not choose God.
However, if you want to personally share your religious belief with another person, the argument that "everyone's a theist except for the atheist elitists" is not the best way to win hearts and minds. For a religious belief (or a philosophical belief, or whatever) to be attractive to me, it has to make sense TO ME…
…and in that light, even a friendly statement such as "I, John, believe in Thor because of what he has done for me" isn't going to make a hill of beans to another person, unless it is followed by the statement "And here is what Thor can do for YOU."
P.S. +Jeremy Hodges has a thread that discusses the wide varieties of non-theism – atheism, agnosticism, humanism, and all the rest.
I became interested in the idea of God after reading Ecclesiastes. Idea and academic study turned into personal faith later.
+John E. Bredehoft My personal belief is that, sooner or later, God chooses everyone.
I don't think your stand is far from mine. The point of John saying / showing "What Vishnu has done for me" is not to convert out of gratitude for John's fortune, but to then say, "Hey, that could be me benefiting in that way."
And, yes, sense comes into it at some level — but I also believe that there is ultimately a Kierkegaardian "leap of faith," that belief is not something you ever can demonstrate or prove in a fashion to overcome all rational argument. If it were, it wouldn't be faith.
It is an interesting take, but I wonder about it. Joy is a strange and illusive thing. When I lost religion, it was painful, very much so. I had to reexamine what it was that made me happy, I shifted from religious thought to science and philosophy and feel better for it, but it was a process that took place over years.
I had since dabbled with a few religions, but none gave me the happiness and peace of mind I craved. That satisfaction had to come from within.
+Chris Ruhs Self-discovery of faith is a different thing, a different path. I was focusing here on active proselytization efforts — "How do I spread the Good News about G'Quon?" — which is one (but I didn't by any means wish to imply the only) way to (or from) a faith.
+Matthew Bannock I was looking for the right words; I almost said "contentment" as well as "joy", but not all faiths provide that (at least not as used). I had to leave things, internally, with "stirring the soul" for resonance and "joy" for happiness and peace of mind and satisfaction, and then let what that looks like and manifests as be carried by "making me a better person."
I don't know what makes one fallacious argument with false premises any better or worse than another. Really, there are only two ways to evaluate an argument: do the premises support the conclusion, and are the premises true or not. His argument fails on both levels, but so do many others.
The one thing I would say is extraordinary is that Tony Jones apparently doesn't know about the fallacy of appeal to popularity. I find it extraordinary that someone who has spent significant time thinking about arguments for the existence of God doesn't recognize and avoid that fallacy.