In the temple of Asherat, men stroll past women on stools. Some women make gestures of invitation. Of the men, Everard notices that:
"Their deportment was reasonably polite; it was a church here." (p. 269)
Prostitution in a church? I had the same thought as Everard - "This is the equivalent of a church" - when I visited the largest Jain Temple in the Western Hemisphere in Leicester, England. There was a side chapel for every Jain sect and, in one chapel, a life-sized male nude statue. A far cry from the Virgin Mary... In India, a temple of Hanuman is a monkey zoo.
What constitutes respect or disrespect to the Lord is entirely a matter of which tradition we are practising in. Someone whose previous experience of Buddhism had been Pure Land was shocked when she entered our Zen meditation hall to see people sitting with their backs to the Buddha: the height of disrespect.
I would not attempt to meditate in the temple of Asherat.
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