Prayers don't work so why do religious keep jabbing at it?

[bemore]

I think that prayers are imprisoning, empowering, selfless, full of hope and many other things depending on the circumstances that they are applied. It's like the worst self hypnosis or the best form of therapy one can give themselves.

It's the application of faith, we all use faith every single day in many different reasons that are outside prayer which can turn into belief. One of these is the placebo effect.

The Placebo Effect Works Even When You Know It’s A Placebo

For the placebo effect to occur, it’s usually considered that deception is required – tricking the patient into thinking that an inert treatment is actually a powerful drug or similar. It’s this need for trickery that has long meant the deliberate inducement of placebo effects in mainstream medicine is seen as unethical. Nearly ten years ago, however, researchers showed that people with irritable bowel syndrome showed greater improvement after being given a so-called “open placebo” that they were told was completely inert, as compared to receiving no treatment. Presumably some residual belief and expectation of an effect survives being told that the treatment is physically impotent (or there is a condition response to the placebo that does not require positive beliefs). More recent research has since shown benefits of open placebos for many other conditions including back pain and hay fever. Open placebos “bypass at least some of the conventional ethical barriers” to the clinical use of placebos, according to some experts. Others however have highlighted the lack of  suitably robust research in this area, and it’s worth noting there have been some null findings – for instance, open placebos failed to speed up wound healing.

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/03/11/the...-findings/

There is no god, so people are talking to themselves, right?

It's just self talk, we all do it, we just don't call it prayer.