The way Christians see that their prayers are answered is just a small part of a large problem. If we zoom out a bit, one will see that the logic Christians use goes something like "I prayed for X, and X happened, so it must have been my prayer that caused X." The bigger problem, which is evident outside of religion, is the acceptance of the statement, "I preformed X, and Y happened, so X must be the cause of Y." It is the same logic people use when they throw a bunch of statistics out in order to show that "people who play violent video games will be violent." One can't make the leap from the occurrence of Y after X to X being the cause of Y. Correlation does not mean causation.
Prayer is to motivational tool as chewing tobacco is to cigarettes. Some people might be able to break their addictions and whatnot, but then they drag around faith-based contradictions in their lives, which I will assume that we all agree are not healthy. Why bother with prayer if you can just break the addiction with a healthy dose of self-esteem? Oh, that's right! Then we would start approving of pride and things like that. I am sure we don't want to start heading down that path . . .
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