Prayer and Meaningfulness: A Three-Component Model of Religion

Abstract

Meaningfulness is an important component of good life and religiousness delivers meaningfulness. Therefore, meaningfulness is a key motive for following religion. Moreover, there is no religion without prayer. However, the relationship of prayer and meaningfulness is not clear. Hence, in the present study, I have attempted a theoretical link between meaningfulness and prayer and, based on it, an understanding of the nature of religiousness. I propose a three-component model of religion (i.e., almighty-God conception, principle-God conception, and their interaction), which suggests that the almighty-God conception is the core of religiousness and the wisdom and knowledge generated by the principle-God conception interact with it to determine a specific (socio-culturally distinct) religiousness.