I'm trying to understand the difference between procedural languages like C and object-oriented languages like C++. I've never used C++, but I've been discussing with my friends on how to differentiate the two.

I've been told C++ has object-oriented concepts as well as public and private modes for definition of variables: things C does not have. I've never had to use these for while developing programs in Visual Basic.NET: what are the benefits of these?

I've also been told that if a variable is public, it can be accessed anywhere, but it's not clear how that's different from a global variable in a language like C. It's also not clear how a private variable differs from a local variable.

Another thing I've heard is that, for security reasons, if a function needs to be accessed it should be inherited first. The use-case is that an administrator should only have as much rights as they need and not everything, but it seems a conditional would work as well:

if ( login == "admin") {
    // invoke the function
}

Why is this not ideal?

Given that there seems to be a procedural way to do everything object-oriented, why should I care about object-oriented programming?