My prayer is useless conjecture:

I am the type of person that likes to think I can think. That may sound silly at first, but mull it over, it will come to you. That having been said, I think that if anyone seriously sat down and divorced themselves from their emotions and vicarious beliefs long enough, they would come to this same conclusion: Prayer is useless.

I don't mean it is useless because all credible studies find it unable to cure illness. No, I mean that the idea of prayer itself is contradictory to a faithful's belief system.
Think about this way: Suppose that God is perfect and omniscient(this is the mainstay of Christians). Now suppose that God has a plan (another mainstay). So by the supposition that your God is perfect, that entity's plan must also be perfect. Therefore, I find it immensely amusing that someone would pray for a chosen outcome to any situation, or attempt to simply inform their chosen entity of how they are feeling.

If the perfect plan calls for death, that death will happen, else you have persuaded a perfect entity with a perfect plan to change its mind, hence reevaluate its plan, exposing imperfection.
Next, you need not inform an entity that already knows how you feel, about how you feel. It already knows that, by your own definition.

I know that this argument has probably been proffered before, but I came up with it myself while conversing with a friend of mine who is deeply religious.
So, given that the idea of thinking is just a way to find out as much about yourself as it is to find out about things around you, I don't understand why more people don't do it.

-Life is not an inherently difficult enterprise, stupid people make it that way......