Talk:Prayer

New quote
Perhaps If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. - Thomas S. Szasz 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: What the article should provide: Needless to say, all of it based on the relevant academic literature. --dab (𒁳) 10:41, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * 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".
 * 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

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)