The recent correspondence (generated by Mr Harmsworth's advice that prayer might help farmers in their alarming situation) is interesting and important.
The atheist view is that, there being nobody to pray to, prayer is no more than empty ritual at worst and meditation (shared or solitary) at best. And meditation is not to be despised. Agnostic prayer, if there be such a thing, would be praying 'to whom it may concern'; that seems to be a non-starter and need detain us no further.
There is pagan prayer; this rests upon the idea that god(s) can be manipulated to do what we wish and is, of course, quite different from the prayer associated with mature belief in God. Such mature belief rests upon the notion that God is on top - not on tap. On this basis, the mature believers' prayers must surely be simply to thank God for what He is and does, to ask Him to help us understand His will, to give us the strength to use our free will in ways that are pleasing to Him and to forgive us when we fail - as fail we so often do.
The Harmsworth-Marwick view seems to be that we can ask and expect favours of God when we are in trouble. This smacks of an attempted manipulation of their god; these persons seem to me to be pagans in Christian clothing.
The sheer futility of petitionary prayer was drawn to my attention by a letter to The SCOTSMAN just before the shooting started in the Gulf. The correspondent wrote something to the effect that "they are praying for peace; that means, on form, that war is about to break out". It did.
Finally, may I declare an interest? Having failed conscientiously to make sense, these fifty odd years, of any of the god-ideas I have heard, I take the atheist view - but without disrespect to the many thoughtful believers whom I know of and care about.