Well, there is Hindu, the tag placed upon people that come from
   a particular set of cultures that says "this is your religious
   affiliation" because many of the practices appear to fit a
   certain mold of "This is Hindu" by those who are doing the
   tagging...

   ...and then there is Hinduism which is a family of belief
   systems and logic systems that historically came from a family
   of cultures but is ALSO Universal in scope. Sometimes they
   coincide, sometimes they don't.

   Growing up in a one square mile town in NJ where you were either
   went to the Protestant Church (which was Methodist) or went to
   the Roman Catholic Church... [as a kid, we knew of no other
   possibilities, at least with the kids and families I knew] - I
   went to the Methodist church because to my mom it was "close
   enough". I enjoyed it and helped form a lot of my assumptions
   about things.

   Among my Catholic (both Italian Catholic *and* Irish Catholic -
   NJ isn't "mostly Italian" by the way - silly stereotype, nor do
   they talk like you hear on TV) friends, some didn't know they
   were Catholic. They just went to church and did their thing.
   Some families didn't to church and when pressed by someone,
   they'd say, "Oh well, my grandparents go to that church over
   there, so I guess I'm Catholic, I dunno".

   So, I think there's room for both a cultural religious tag and
   also a deeply held belief system that can be abstracted somewhat
   from its culture of origin and universalized, making it
   accessible to a larger population than just people who happened
   to be born in a particular family with particular traditions.