I now delve into the pressing issues on my mind. I've heard people talk about their "relationship" with God my whole life. I've even talked about mine in front of crowds of encouraging, wishful thinking friends, and describing how God had "answered" my prayers. If concepts were software, this one would be vaporware. Enter the cold hard voice of reason. I will attempt to distill the various ramblings of people I have tried to talk to about this.

Let's say you pray that God would help you find a better job, or whatever. Most Christians would hold that all of the following could constitute an answer to that prayer.
a. You hear a voice that says Yes or No.
b. You hear and sense nothing.
c. Absolutely any one of the items in the very large set called "all possible events" happens, including losing your job and getting crushed by truck or becoming a Satanist.

"God will answer my prayer" means "Anything at all might happen." Conversely, the set of circumstances most Christians would describe as non-answers to prayer is actually the null set. A friend of mine recently admitted
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I agree with your points that there is no way to know whether God answered a prayer or it just occurred through "circumstances."
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This is like a pen pal that you've never seen and never receive a response from. Maybe their letters are getting lost in the mail, maybe they aren't writing, or maybe they don't even exist. Either way, what you have is definitely not communication.

Let's understand something very basic. Meaningful statements about reality must exclude certain possibilities (they must define a non-empty partial subset of all conceivable possibilities.) A statement that is true in any imaginable state of affairs is meaningless. This of course is the beauty of so many religious concepts. As long as you don't think too hard, you can believe them no matter what, and that is a comforting thought.

What's my age again? I have to ask myself. In SoCal, Tom Leykis commands an impressive listening base of 18-35 year old males on 97.1 the FM talk station. Embittered by failed marriages, he now instructs his listeners in the art of getting laid in 3 dates or less. A purely fictional epitome of the type of guy Tom makes fun of:
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Dear Tom,
I had a crush on a girl in high school, but never made anything of it. I haven't been able to forget about her. I've called her sporadically since high school, and every time it reminded me how amazingly intriguing she is. Now I'm 23, and being in SoCal for the summer I'm finally within 2000 miles of her. I have visited her a couple of times in San Francisco, and we talked late into the night and she was amazing. Absolutely fascinating. She's also the most beatiful woman I have and will ever lay eyes on. No close seconds. Perfect. Literally takes my breath away Tom. Time stands still when she smiles at me. She makes me want to curl up and cry. If there was a 1 in a million chance she feels anything for me, I'd drop everything to take it. What should I do Tom?
-Pathetic Loser in LA
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And Tom would say something like "man, you are one pathetic loser. You should either kill yourself right now or grow up and forget about this girl."

On a completely unrelated note, I plan on learning to paraglide this weekend in San Francisco. People kill themselves all the time doing that. And yes, if you bring a friend, you can save almost 50% on the lessons.

I went to the Getty Museum today with Alisa, John, Bihn, Arun and Paul. Turns out it was mostly just a bunch of art. John was the only truly interested person there, which i found strange because he is supposedly an engineer like the rest of us, who were content to wander aimlessly past priceless masterpiece after priceless masterpiece, pausing only occasionally to half-heartedly read the first few lines of one of the little placards under the paintings. Waiting around for John to finish actually looking at all the paintings was slightly annoying, but as the climate control in those galleries is second to none, there was no rush to get back outside and start sweating again in the sun.