I think the sexuality of some flavors of Hinduism and the indifferent abuse of other human beings are not entirely unrelated. Free love seems great in concept as long as you ignore all the messy details.

I think westerners who embrace eastern religions are generally fairly ignorant about what they're embracing, it seems all foreign and exotic, and they don't see the ugly side. I remember reading the Dalai Lama once where he was teaching that there's nothing wrong with buying prostitutes, but that oral sex is an abomination. Apparently abortions and cervical cancer don't offend his sensibilities. (This was before there was a vaccine.) I see his whole power structure to have been a superstition based protection racket: support our idle, authoritarian lifestyle, and demons won't destroy your crops. I think Tibet has a right to be free from China, Tibetans aren't Chinese, but the Hollywood glamorization of what they had going on there previously is pretty ridiculous. I'm not suggesting that its worse in all regards than western religions, just that its not pretty either.

Depressed this week Philosopher? I typically do a lot of whining about this sort of thing, but I hadn't noticed it from you before.