Ok.... Explain this one?

[Tonus]

I don't know! I've NEVER had a person who prayed, come to me and say they weren't answered in some way.

Was it the exact results they wanted? No, not in every case. But, in my experience of "life & death" cases there have been miracles not explained, except that there were prayers involved.

I felt the same way as you do when I was a believer. Regardless of how things turned out, we could rationalize it as a prayer being answered. But while the explanations were predictable, the results never were. So we thought we were showing people a consistency of results, when what we had was a consistency of rationalizations. Showing us a result that isn't consistent, and applying a rationalization that is, does not offer a compelling argument for divine intervention; it offers a compelling argument for "we see what we want to see."

Does prayer help those that pray... and don't really trust God? that's another good question. I don't know. I have only my own experiences.

As a believer I would have said that yes, prayers can help those who do not believe, as long as the prayer is asking something in keeping with god's will. (Acts 10 may be an example of this)

Again, most extreme cases were answered in prayer. I can't think of one where it didn't help. Not one.

Nor can we prove that the devout and virtuous people that died in natural disasters prayed to god, but I think we would also find it very unlikely that none of them ever did. When any outcome can be rationalized as an answer to prayer, then it's easy to believe that god answers prayers.