On the lunacy of prayer

[Brian37]

The Bible states that prayers will be answered. There is no interpretation about this - it is black and white.

However, it is also incontrovertible that praying does certainly not give you any results you may choose - otherwise the world would be predominantly filled with happy, 200 year old Christian billionaires, with excellent health and very large genitalia, which is certainly not true.

A lot of Christians will say "oh - that isn't how prayer works - it works THROUGH YOU" which is certainly a more logical view (and has even been recently plainly stated by Pope Francis). I can certainly appreciate the "through you" logic - for example, someone prays for the strength to look after a sick relative and their belief gives them additional strength to carry on, motivates them to give that person better care, medical assistance -> and the person gets better. Someone prays for guidance on how better to cope with loss, and because they believe their God is assisting them it gives them additional strength to achieve their goal. However neither of these two examples requires a divine, omnipotent being and the strength comes purely from within the person themselves. It's effectively like a placebo effect in action - the belief itself creates the energy and action.

But - There are many millions of people who firmly believe that prayer works literally and not indirectly.

• How many times do people in church communities pray for sick community members - this would be completely pointless unless their requests motivated God to intervene on your behalf.
  
• Many times I have had religious people say they will "pray for me" to change my mind about not believing in their God. Again - pointless unless there was some direct intervention.
  
• Politicians praying for families of victims of mass shootings in the US. This one just makes my blood boil for various reasons. 
  

It is this interpretation which I simply cannot understand a rational person even entertaining because of the logical dissonance it requires, and / or the overwhelming and easily obtainable evidence to the contrary.
Examples:

• If two people pray for opposite teams in a sports match, do the "votes" cancel out?
  
• If I pray for my child to do well in a running race at school and the other parent does the same - what happens? Does it matter how hard / earnestly I pray? 
  
• There is ZERO statistical evidence of any advantage in having large numbers of people pray for your health to improve over not doing this
  
• There is ZERO statistical evidence of Christians having better marriages, safer road trips, better luck in exams, or any of the uncountable other things that Christians pray for on a daily basis.
  

I can come to only two rational explanations for literal believe in prayer:

1. Pure indoctrination. If your parents tell you the right thing to do is go down on your knees next to your bed every night from when you were 2 and that it works 100%, and wave away every single instance where it does not with vague explanations, you will certainly do it, and it will likely carry over into the rest of your life.
   
2. Confirmation bias. If you pray for Uncle Bob to get cured from cancer and he is lucky and with treatment goes into remission, that is an incredibly powerful nod towards your belief. It will make you forget that Aunt Mary and Cousin Jimmy died from cancer last year and you prayed for them too - oh well, I guess it was God's will... but uncle Bob got cured because of ME!
   

The other point I have heard from theists is that statistics are meaningless because you can't measure whether prayer works ie. it only works if it is unobserved - in other words if someone is watching / counting / keeping score, then prayer doesn't work. How convenient. What a cruel SOB God must be to deny your wish to save your spouse from death just because someone may be analysing cross-demographic dependencies based on death rates vs religions affiliation a few years later.

Of course, a literal belief of prayer in and of itself logically is complete nonsense. I am however interested in hearing a theist's explanation on how they believe prayer works and how they get around some of the logical impossibilities above. How are you able to correlate real life experiences with societal expectations and actual (not just perceived) observations of this phenomenon.

I have also only touched on the concept of praying "for" things, not simply to "talk" or get close to God - but that is another topic altogether.

When paying my over the phone bills, it seems the standard response is "Is there anything else I can help you with?" at the end of the call. I end the call with, "Can you get me a date with Angelina Jolie?".