Pick a country, any country, with a long non-Christian tradition - Japan, Iran, or Tonga - and imagine many of of the citizens taking on the entire set of paraphernalia of the Roman Catholic church, from confession to Gothic steeples to a different Bible to child molesting - and then systematically denying that any of it was religious. The "priests", while teaching classes in confession, communion, and all the other rituals, are insisting that they are exercises, purely aesthetic experiences with no religious content.

And then they start inventing really weird combinations of confession and mud wrestling, Easter and televised kick-me-in-the-gonads games, S&M Jesii clubs, and stuff like that.

It's worth a satirical novel, at least.

Sorry, I do not subscribe to the "yoga needs to go back to its roots" philosophy where women stayed home and did all the frickin' work, while the guys went to "do yoga" on a mountain top for 3 months. Yoga is NOT Hinduism. Hinduism is not yoga.

I agree that most yoga in the US (especially that based at my gym) is just the physical asana with a short rest at the end and lots of breathing. But people need the exposure in some way and if that is what gets them to start so they grow in their practices, that's what they need.

And the other day I saw a program about an American yoga teacher that planned, plotted, and carried out a nearly-perfect murder attempt. Didn't succeed, naturally, but that's one hell of a yoga teacher. Yoga is supposed to teach a sense of morality, not a desire to murder. Ah well...