The Buddha taught that salvation is attained through ones own efforts?

If belief in an omnipotent creator being makes sense to you and helps you how to live a virtuous life, then that is what's best for you. His Holiness the Dalai Lama always stresses this.

The Buddha didn't teach about "salvation" but rather that there is suffering, what suffering is (the causes and conditions) and the prescription for shedding suffering and leading a virtuous life for you and the benefit of all sentient beings. This is me paraphrasing about the 4 Noble (or Arya) truths.

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I think it is a wonderful thing to take responsibility for yourself. After all most of us have an inbuilt sense of right and wrong and it has always seemed to me to be a personal weakness to have to pray to a higher authority to help give me the moral courage to do what I already know is right.

However we are all different characters in this walk we call life. Some people accept the teachings they have been taught from birth and some of us want to explore other ways of doing things.

I think that most human beings want the reassurance of someone or something that will bale us out in times of trouble and be a comfort to us for the future we cannot see, especially when it comes to death and what we may hope lies beyond. There is courage in accepting that this may well be all there is.

What Vinslave says is perfectly correct. I don't know what merited her a TD.

The idea that people should stay with their own religion and not convert to Buddhism unless they felt really strongly about it came from the Buddha himself.

Buddhism dos not seek converts. Buddhism seeks an end to suffering.

The major problem of such theory is that it will ensure a justification for those successful ones in this world that they truly deserves it: either beneficiated from the deed of his/her previous life, or was the logical consequence of the efforts in this life as the Protestantism implied, while we all know this is untrue.

But your question is very theoretical, and you indicate that you have preconceived notions of what the answer should be. That is, you are really making a complaint about what you feel is exploitation of intuition, and not asking for new information, as you have already made up your mind.

Jesus says I am the way the truth and the life no one comes to the Father but through me.

A persons success in the afterlife should be determined by the effort they take while alive.

Buddhism is the smart choice. You know it. I know it. No contest.