Beware of God #2

This is going to be something of an outlier for the series: It's not about any specific sign, just a trend I'm noticing. In my town, there's an awful lot of church signs about the power of prayer.

Prayer was one of the things that confused me as a kid. If God's omniscient, the act is pointless, since he'd be able to just read my mind to know what I want or need. As a result of that little line of reasoning, I tended to think of anyone who went on about prayer excessively as a little too pagan to be a modern Christian. My old fallacies aside, it seems to me that prayer is a big problem for the religious.

If prayer is supposed to work as advertised, you'd think literalists would be able to do something with mountains. Even if they can't work like Level 30 Clerics, you'd expect that they'd at least be able to consistently demonstrate statistically significant events for medical stuff. No such luck, last I checked.

Of course, many of my fellow skeptics know all about the dilemma this forms when you consider the idea of a "divine plan": Is the magic man going to change the universe's planned future just for you? Does he need reminding of the details? What's up with that?