Friar Tuck writes in.

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Uma Mysorekar, President of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, was on the Colbert Show, that bastion of investigative journalism. It seems all too usual for segments on Hinduism to do a not entirely adequate job, and this one was no exception. I was not quite satisfied with Mysorekar's comments on Hinduism. (Nor, for that matter, with all of Colbert's one liners. It is not quite true that Hindus don't eat meat. A significant fraction do.) Mysorekar's comments didn't quite cut it. Perhaps it represented her own Hindu tradition, but I don't think that her remarks made for an accurate representation of the religion as a whole.

An issue that must be dealt with while dissecting Hinduism is the problem of essentialism. While the most popular varieties of Hinduism are essentialist, it cannot be said that all varieties of Hinduism are essentialist. Hinduism is not necessarily bound to an essentialist approach. This makes it impossible to make definitive statements about certain aspects of the religion. Hinduism has possibly as much diversity within it as other religions have between them. Belief in God, for instance, is not a single position under Hinduism. It spans a range of positions from atheism to agnosticism to polytheism to monotheism. The Hindu tradition includes a whole range of traditions, each of which has its own particular beliefs on the matter. Mysorekar's opinions are just those - her own personal opinions on what Hinduism is.