The Christian believer in answered prayer compartmentalizes. They protect prayer as prayer and individual prayers from being shown to be useless or even harmful. That is bad enough. But Jesus said that if you pray for something, act and think as if it is yours, and it will be yours. Now we have to treat prayer as answered before it is answered.
You would be considered mentally disturbed if you lived as if prayer was about to be answered too much. Yet if answers happen, that would be fine. You try to make the belief sound saner than it is by being selective. There is no honesty in cherry-picking. If you really think prayer is that great or works, you will not be ignoring possible answers to prayer to focus on a few handy ones.
An answered prayer is an answered prayer. So, to cherry-pick what prayers you assert are answered is a way of calling answers to prayer unreliable. Yet you are going into denial about it. It is no surprise then that people protect their prayer or magical beliefs from being shown flimsy or false. Examples: the medium won't be too clear, and the clients themselves want the vagueness. Messages from John do not carry the same presence as even a minute in John's company would when he was alive. It does not sound or feel the same. And nobody in the séance room cares. Prayer, like the medium, deliberately goes after things that maybe happen anyway—and is careful not to be too detailed. If prayer works, then you could ask for John to convert to Jesus at 12 noon tomorrow at the diner. Nobody does that. They ask for conversion, and if it does not happen, they reason that it might have in some hidden way.
We see that they reason that prayer always helps when it does not. We see they are clearly getting others on board too. The one who prays for X to happen is trying to involve others. They also have to help, or at least not hinder, this person's prayer and their claim that the prayer works. If you think somebody is praying, you may feel good about doing nothing yourself. You don't have to be praying yourself for that to happen.
The person wants to feel that they did something by praying, even if it is not true. Spell-casters do the same thing. In that sense, prayer has no right to claim to be wiser than magic.
Let us make a list of the other reasons why prayer is self-centered, selfish, and arrogant:
It feels good for you to feel and think you are above error—who do you think you are? Belief in prayer is made infallible. There is more infallibility in putting your proposition outside of examination than simply saying, “This is true because I say so.” It becomes, “This is true because I say there is no way to refute it.” Prayer is an idol. Even if there is a God, God cannot accept it. Prayer, paradoxically, is anti-God and is an idol. It disrespects truth, for you try to avoid refutation, so prayer is a lie and thus seems to think that God and everybody else is stupid and cannot see it.
If you regard praying as mattering more than good works when there is a choice, then praying is fanatical and twisted. And you must, for Jesus said that prayer is an expression of a relationship with God, so to love God totally means to pray totally. He commanded total love, so that means total prayer.
Human nature cannot mean it when it pretends it wants strangers and acquaintances, etc., to be, say, cancer-free as much as it does your loved ones and close friends and family. In reality, if Ann is evil and Mary is good, if you could do some magic to make sure that if one of them gets cancer it is going to be Ann, you would. If that attitude is not explicit in the believer, it is still there. The believer does not need to be aware of it.
Saying that you trust God above everyone and everything, and that you express this by prayer, sounds humble. But is it? In fact, it is a self-righteous boast posing as humility. And it is nothing to boast about. If there is a choice between God/prayer and doing good for others, then do good for them. If there is a choice between trusting God most and trusting only God, then choose the first—it is less extreme. Yet religion following Christ demands that you do the latter! Another reason the “trust” thing is a boast is that you don't see God, and many people lack faith, for they think God is not the great being people say he is. So you have every reason not to trust or to think that the trust of God is the trust of a God you have made up in your head. If you trust, that is quite an amazing achievement! But do you really trust against such big odds? It is too good to be real! The trust you say you have is a boast and is arrogant.
Nobody knows if it is really prayer that motivates good deeds. If you do good better after praying, it does not prove that God is motivating you. If prayer motivates, then it is possible that prayer motivates you even if there is no God. A need for prayer need not necessarily imply a need for God, though prayer pretends to call on and need God.
Prayer is often just magical self-delusion in disguise. People like to believe that their thoughts and desires have a magical influence on reality so that if you wish for something it can come true, or evil WILL come true. This lessens or takes away their fear of the future. Their notion is delusional, for there are things we cannot control—we cannot control what another person thinks. We all know we cannot do it in small things, so why do we think we can do it in major things? Thinking we control others and the universe leads to anger, disappointment, and resentment. Thinking this is so common that many people who say they do not think it actually don't realize they think it. On balance, it is very, very likely that the person who prays is trying to manipulate others.
Superstitious behavior is a notorious and almost universal human trait, and the appeal is that people want the smug glow that comes from thinking they have helped you when they have not. Even those who detest superstition engage in it. They may feel that if they get a red car, in some unexplainable way, they will be immune to accidents. They feel that if they sit in the right seat during a football match, it influences the outcome of the match and their favored team will win. They feel they control what they in fact do not control at all. If the team wins, they feel they have caused their win. This trait is so strong that it is reasonable to suppose that whoever is praying for you when you are sick is not that interested in helping you but wants to feel they caused you to get better. Even if prayer is not in itself magical, the fact is that most (if not all) people who pray are treating it as magic and thus abusing it.
We tend to be grateful to things when they benefit us. We feel a sense of gratitude toward the car that gets us to the hospital. We kick and curse the car and swear at it when it breaks down. We treat events and things as if they consciously bless us or curse us. It is no wonder then that we so easily—and too easily—believe in God and pray to God. Our motivation is suspect—we are possibly idolaters nearly all the time anyway. Prayer is superstition. A person who gives you a rabbit's foot wants to feel he has helped you but without helping you. Prayer is the same thing, except it can be made to look non-superstitious. If you don't want to help somebody, giving them some magical item or praying for them is the lazy way—you feel you have helped when you don't want to help them, right?
Most people enjoy prayer and get a lift from it because it expresses and dwells on their desire to be better people or to see others better off. Simply thinking about how you would like to see others happier would do the same thing. But many people pray to help. They need to take steps to make what they pray for happen. Prayer itself will not do it. People like to feel sympathy for others, but they should like helping others better. Feeling sympathy for somebody does no good if you are not interested in helping. Dwelling on how you feel can and will lead to you using the feelings to tell yourself how wonderful and compassionate you are when you in fact are doing nothing that counts. You are indulging yourself in navel-gazing fashion.
Praying, it is said, gives us something to do when everything else fails. But you cannot really know if you have tried everything. Maybe an option you thought was out of the question was actually the best or the right answer. Nobody really uses prayer as a last resort, for you would expect God to see through you.
Prayer, like religion in general, thrives on arguments from ignorance. They are based on the illogical reasoning, "I don't know how this happened and came about; therefore, a supernatural power was behind it." It is dangerous if we take such logic seriously—believers only adopt it when it suits them, which shows they do not believe in it as deeply as they may pretend. Prayer violates the fact that you do not explain an unknown by invoking or inventing another unknown. People guess that such and such was caused by prayer. It is a desecration of your reason.
Prayer motivated by evil is said to be ignored by God. People who sin and don't repent are asking God for a favor while refusing to repent, so their prayer is just useless. And especially if they ask for the conversion of others. To try and fool God with prayer and expect results is magic. It would take huge magic to fool an all-seeing God. People engage in useless and hypocritical prayer and can spend ages at it and go on pilgrimages. They do this because they feel holy, though they are not. And it does seem to them that even these prayers are answered. Even praying to the duck down at the park would seem to be answered at times. They must know that even if what they ask for happens, it does not mean that God accepted their prayer, for they were pretending to connect with Him and were not. Thus we can be sure that the more selfish we are, the more we pray for the sick and those we cannot help, the more we are trying to feel good about doing nothing. Praying only nurtures our smug selfishness.
We cannot know how many people use prayer as an excuse for neglecting to help. If prayer works, then “excuse” is not the right word. The right word is “reason.” It would follow that you cannot be accused of neglect when you let your seriously ill child go without a doctor on the basis that you are praying for her. And what if she dies? But one thing is for sure: few people are strongly committed to improving society, so clearly they are using prayer, if they are religious, as an excuse for doing little or nothing. You should be taken to court for neglect.
Even believers say that prayer can be an excuse for taking little or no action to solve problems. People may want to dump the work onto God to let them live lazy, selfish, and unfruitful lives and feel good about it.
If a lot of help is given by those who pray, and there is a direct connection to the praying, that does not matter if some serious harm comes as a result of praying. What is the point of praying if it helps people do good within limits but they do nothing when war looms?
We would need to know how many pray because they don't want to do anything really productive for others. What if it is most or nearly all or actually all? We risk promoting evil if we promote prayer without knowing. Religion, of course, makes no effort to address this.