Many Hindus hère are also westerners, many non hindu but awesome people hère are westerners, I don't think your bordering insulting generalisations about westerners help getting your point of view welcomed and understood.
I also think you need to become comfortable with the fact that Western Hindus do indeed exist, and not look at them as any lesser than Indian Hindus.
I should clarify- I'm Western myself. I'm not at all uncomfortable with Western Hindus; I'm inspired by them and I long to meet as many of them as I possibly can.
What I'm talking about is the hijacking of Eastern religion—not just Hinduism but also Buddhism, Taoism, etc.—in the West. Not by sincere Western adherents to these faiths, but by people whose primary goals are, in my view, political and cultural. I'm talking about the New Age movement and "alternative" spirituality (not alternative spirituality in general but those who go out of their way to express themselves as alternative).
I'm not denying that there might be many genuine seekers in these movements, but so much of it appears to me to just be modern Western values of radical individualism, sexual libertinism, and even secularism, cloaked with a thin veneer of superficial spirituality. The goal for many within these movements seems to me to be to create a sort of anti-Christianity, and since Eastern religion is exotic and unfamiliar to the average Westerner, Eastern religious symbols, practices and even deities are cherrypicked and used in completely different contexts and for completely different purposes than they are in the East.
I know I'm not the only one who feels this way because I've read a number of people, including Western followers of Eastern religion, write about this phenomenon.
I should also explain that I'm the kind of person who is constantly forming mental associations. For better or for worse, my initial experience with a thing can color my perception of it for years to come,
even if I come to learn intellectually that my initial experience was not representative of the whole. For me, these associations occur below the rational parts of my brain, and they've proven very difficult to change.
I flirted with leftism as a teenager, but for most of my adult life I've been socially and culturally conservative. My worldview is very much at odds with those of most Western New Agers. Now New Agers are certainly not the only Westerners who are interested in Eastern religious concepts, but they are definitely the loudest and most "in your face" about it (again, I believe it very often is about challenging traditional and Christian norms).
So I came to roll my eyes at and ignore
any Westerner expressing
anything about Eastern religion. I came to associate Eastern religion with values I very much disagreed with and wanted little to do with. I'm quite sure I missed out on hearing a lot of wisdom due to this ignorant attitude. When I finally started to learn about, admire, and eventually find true faith in more authentic and traditional forms of Eastern religion—particularly within Hinduism—I was upset that my negative associations had caused me to avoid Eastern religion for so long. And still now, though I intellectually understand these concepts much better, and rationally realize that those Western examples of Eastern religion that I view as negative are not at all representative of the whole, when I see New Age interpretations of things like yoga, tantra, goddess worship, etc., they often weaken my interest in even the more traditional forms of these practices. Because of those mental associations which are so deeply ingrained in my mind. Not negative associations with Western Hindus, but with those who seek to divorce these concepts from their Hindu context and use them for something entirely different.
A similar process occurred with me and Christianity. I was raised Catholic, and like many, I fell away from the Church due to negative associations I made with the religion when I was young. As I grew older I came to learn more about, understand, respect, sympathize with, and deeply admire the Church. But when I made a concerted effort to return to the Church, not just intellectually but in terms of actual practice, I found it extremely difficult. I had a handful of disagreements with the theology, but the main blockage came from those negative mental associations.
but what about the real human sacrifices done by some Tantra cultists in India to Shiva?
They absolutely bother me and create negative mental associations for me, as do the stories of Thugs who killed for Kali. I struggle a lot with these as well.