Talk:Prayer

New quote

Perhaps {{cquote|If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. - Thomas S. Szasz<ref>[http://thinkexist.com/quotation/if_you_talk_to_god-you_are_praying-if_god_talks/225684.html Thomas Szasz quotes]</ref> }} can be included

Article scope

Clearly, the article topic here is the comparative discussion of "prayer" in anthropology and comparative religion. What the article should not focus on, by WP:SS:

• prayer healing: this is a very specific subtopic, mostly limited to the past century or so, mostly limited to the Western or Christian sphere. The thing already has its own page
• juxtaposition of religious traditions: Christian prayer etc. These are useless unless there is comparative material based on scholarly literature. Otherwise, just use "see also: Christian prayer".

What the article should provide:

• definitions of the term by academic field. This is not easy, as the term means vastly different things in different fields.
• anthropology
• evolutionary psychology
• individual or group psychology
• comparative history of religion
• comparative presentation of religious teachings

Needless to say, all of it based on the relevant academic literature. --dab (𒁳) 10:41, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Lead

I have noticed that the lead has been significantly truncated recently, with information about the efficacy of prayer and history of prayer omitted. I can't date this change but I note there was no discussion on the talk page about rewriting the lead? I can understand rationale - to avoid controversial statements - however the lead must summarise all sections of the article, per WP:LEAD. I have reincorporated a couple of sentences that I believe address several topics within the article. I would appreciate some discussion here before these revisions are reverted. --Hazhk (talk) 15:49, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

Supine prayers?

The traditional posture of prayer in medieval Europe is kneeling or supine with clasped hands. Was supine (laying on your back) really a traditional prayer stance? The only illustrations I've seen of someone apparently praying in that position is effigies on tombs, which I expect is an artistic convention rather than an example of how they actually prayed. A quick Google search for medieval images of people praying returns almost exclusively kneeling (on one knee or two), and a few standing. I'm sure I've also seen images of people praying prostrate as well, but they didn't show up in the search. Did people actually pray in a supine position, or is this an error (possibly a confusion between supine and prone)? Iapetus (talk) 21:47, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Article issues and classification

Greetings, this article fails the B-class criteria (#1). There are:

• "disputed statements" from 2009,
• "articles needing factual verification" from 2018 & 2020
• "Articles needing more viewpoints" from 2018 that sounds like balance issues,
• "Articles with unsourced statements" from 2021, and the lesser,
• "Wikipedia articles needing page number citations" from 2014 & 2020. -- Otr500 (talk) 20:36, 16 February 2023 (UTC)