| Summary: | What religion does for its followers and how people use religion in their lives is something that is of interest from a historical perspective as well as from a contemporary perspective. The purpose of this essay is to analyze and interpret how functional aspects of world religions are presented in textbooks. To perform this content analysis I will be using functional definitions of religion, that I will explain and interpret and then use as tools in the content analysis of the textbooks. Based on the results of the content analysis, I will compare similarities and differences in how the functional aspects of world religions are presented in the textbooks. I discovered that the similarity in its presentation of the functional aspects of the religions is that they are based on social systems which include the creation of social representations and perception of reality. The main difference in their presentation is that Christianity is described from a Swedish perspective and in relation to the Swedish context, while the other world religions are described in a more common way. The functional aspects of these religions are described in a basic and generalizing way, for example, that there is only one kind of Judaism and one Buddhism.
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