I've attended Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Bible church, Pentecostal, Methodist, Jehovah's witness, non-denominational and a pseudo-Islamic services. If any prayers were ever answered by any god/s, none of the others would still exist.

I am very impressed with your openness and honesty!

Those people are lying to you, and I don't think they even believe their own bs. If a prayer is 'answered' it's just happenstance and sheer coincidence. And good for you in at least asking for important things- those people are just hypocrites.

Im an atheist, always have been, but I did try that prayer thing a couple of times,,, always went like this "dear god please let me win the lottery" and NOPE,, nothing. Not being a sucker for punishment I went back to believing that god is a figment of peoples imaginations.

People's memories are not perfect and studies have shown tht people memories change to suit and support their beliefs. People who think tht their prayers are always answered, change their memories of what they asked for to match the reality of what they actually go and they rationalize what they actually got, even if it doesn't match their memories, to be in accordance with god's wishes, so that too can be seen as an answer.

For such people facts and reality are not as important as beign right about wha thtye believe, because if their belief structure on which they based their life is seen as wrong, they woudl look foolish, so they rationalize away and change their memories to support their beliefs, because reality doesn't and won't.

When these people pray they do not tell anyone what they pray for, because that is between them and their god. But, they will claim anecdotally that their prayers were answered. There is a reason why anecdotal evidence is not accepted in courts or in scientific discovery. It is highly unreliable.

I went through a somewhat similar process 30 years ago. The thought of my prayers being unanswered because I was unworthy didn't occur to me, though - not because I felt sure I was worthy, but rather because I knew that none of us were worthy in that sense in God's sight. We were all sinful creatures; none of us measured up ("Judge not lest ye be judged" is one of the most valuable lessons I took away from Christianity, and, yeah, I know, millions of Christians ignore that command, but I didn't). Anyway, God was supposed to answer prayers not on the basis of our individual worth, but on the basis of the worthiness of the prayer and of the person's faith and humility.

So I wasn't worrying about whether I was worthy. What I wrestled with instead was what I called "prayer categories." Of course, there were the prayers that didn't require God to do anything apparent in the real world (i.e., prayers of Adoration, Confession, or Thanksgiving). Set those aside. What we're talking about here are prayers of Supplication. I divided those into 3 subcategories, based on what I'd been learning and my own logic. To my mind, there seemed to be 3 ways to ask for divine intervention:

(a) Requests for intervention in the natural world -- praying for hurricanes to miss cities, praying for an end to a dangerous heat wave, praying for the end of a loved one's illness, etc.

Requests for intervention in someone else's heart/mind -- praying for the softening of a hostile person's attitude, praying that a potential romantic partner will find/fall in love with you, praying for successful diplomacy to end a war, etc.

Requests for intervention in your own heart/mind -- praying for understanding, praying for a kinder heart, praying for serenity, praying for courage, etc.

So, looking at these in turn, ....

If God is going to answer a Category A prayer, then God is going to have to break one or more Natural Laws. Either that - or He knew you were going to pray that at the beginning of time, so He set up the universe in such a way that that prayer was going to be answered by the existing natural laws. Presumably then, if you don't make that prayer because you figure all the natural laws are already set up to take care of the problem, then He knew you'd get lazy and won't have set things up the way you would have asked. HOWEVER, I quickly realized that this was all nonsense. Whatever the Bible might have reported about this or that miracle, God seemed in recent history to have a very strong commitment to the natural laws that He'd established at the beginning of time. When a hurricane is incoming, there's no shortage of people praying for it to miss them or their loved ones. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It seldom misses everyone's loved ones, and there were invariably Christians among the grievously affected. Soooo ... I gave God the benefit of the doubt for the moment, concluding that He didn't answer Category A prayers because they screwed with Natural Law, which He apparently doesn't do (any more?).

In much the same way, Category B prayers requesting divine intervention in someone else's mind/heart involves screwing with that person's Free Will. Neither sin nor voluntary obedience to God are possible if people don't have Free Will. It isn't really obedience if you don't have a choice, right? So sending God a Category B prayer was like asking Him to violate the whole premise of creating humans in the first place. He could have made Adam and Eve perfectly obedient and then there would never have been a Fall, but then he'd just have created a bunch of robots praising him and never doing anything wrong. So Category B prayers started to seem as pointless as Category A. (and, yeah, I knew plenty of Bible stories where God had intervened in someone's mind/heart, most notably all the times he hardened Pharaoh's heart so that God could show his power by sending another plague on the Egyptians - which was a dick move if ever there was one. But, yeah, I attributed that sort of report as human embellishment. If God won't intervene in free will now, then He didn't then, either)

That left Category C. I found Category C prayers plausible since I was asking (through my own free will) for God's intervention in myself. But doesn't that start making God range of activity pretty damn small? I kept asking God to help me understand which kinds of prayers made sense and which didn't. I didn't want to sell Him short, but neither did I want to waste His time (and my hopes) with unanswerable prayers.

This was one stream of thinking that eventually led to my becoming an agnostic atheist. There were others, of course, but not relevant to your post.

Prayer is the early evolutionary form of what we call a mission statement or strategic
Plan. it focuses us upon the task at hand and helps turn our anxiety into patients while we wait for the outcome. One who thinks a prayer was answered is just oblivious to the process.

We my christian friends pray, I always ask they why they are trying to change gods mind! As Dysnomia mentioned, the placebo effect is very powerful. For example, a co-work that worked in the maintenance department got tried of this one lady always complaining she was cold, so they hung a fake thermostat set at 75 degrees next to her desk, and she never complained after that. Also, put a band-aid on a child that just has a little scratch and they are all better. The mind is easy to trick!

All research shows that answered prayer and random chance occur at an identical rate. Who'd have thought?

I'm one of "those" who espouse the belief that thought has energy and that prayer is focused energy. So...by focusing your thoughts on manifesting something you might actually cause it to happen somehow. Of course, there's no proof or evidence but I think it's a valid idea.

OK, a couple of things here...
If you pray do you then go on, using it like an affirmation, to constructively get what you want?
Do you pray for a nice day tomorrow as you have an interview, or a helicopter or ferrari? (one is definately more attainable than the other, isn't it.)
Also, if you have a little time google the placebo effect (the human mind is a wonderful thing).

Just the maths of pure chance are going to mean that there will be a percentage of asks that will appear to have been answered no matter how unlikely they would appear to be. On the other hand there will also be the proportion of asks that are apparently unanswered no matter how deserving. so I think your continuing position of Agnostic is quite mathematically sound as well as philosophically sound..

Probability predicts that if you pray for enough things you will get at less one by random occurrence.