Can prayer change God's perfect plan?

[Fake Messiah]

I believe God wants us to pray, and also to do something towards protecting earth.

Consider the prayer of a mother, spoken aloud or thought in silence, as she embraces her suffering and dying baby: "I beg you, God, save my baby. Please, God, don't let her die." This is a prayer for a young child, easily the most innocent and worthy of rescue of anyone. It's about as sincere and unselfish as any prayer could be. I think this is the prayer that provides us with an ideal way to judge whether or not God answers prayers. Yet the number and intensity of prayers seem to have no impact on the constant suffering and dying of babies in extreme poverty.

Remember the poor tend to pray hard and pray often. Extreme poverty and religious belief seem matched in some weird way between hope and despair, then how does the world play out? If prayer works, then we should see the most religious societies on Earth as the most "blessed," secure, and safest places to live. Meanwhile, the least religious societies ought to be more distressed, because there is much less praying for positive divine intervention. Is this the world we see? Not even close.

Fact is that religious belief and prayer do not save the lives of babies or ease their suffering in any detectable way. But this is precisely what many religious people claim. God answers prayers? No, he doesn't, it seems, even if you are a religious and loving mother begging for her dying child's life.

There is a really good point by Sam Harris how only narcissistic people can think that God answers prayers, because they are so blind with being obsessed with themselves that they fail to see billions of people that don't get their prayers answered by so called god.