Last night I sat around waiting for trick-or-treaters. None came to my door. Not that I was really surprised. In New York, parents generally take their kids in and out of the stores, which offer candy to all the adorably greedy little ones. Even so, I had bought a plump bag of bite-size MilkyWays so I’d be ready. I guess I’ll just have to eat them myself.

Waiting around for trick-or-treaters got me thinking about Halloween, and from there, to ruminating, for the umpteenth time in my life, on religion. Halloween is one of those holidays Christianity appropriated (religions on the rise do well when they take over beliefs already in place and merely modify them to fit their own idea). Yet even though Halloween has become secular (save for Wiccans and the like), its inherent paganism shines through. Set in autumn (the end of the harvest and well into the dying of the light) and marked by people dressed in costumes and wearing masks, Halloween eerily suggests — to all but the most doggedly secular — the spirit of the dead.

From the most rational standpoint, all religions — pagan, polytheistic, monotheistic, Zen, whatever — lie somewhere on a scale of wackiness. Yet as forces of history, they demand respect. Some religions seem kinder and gentler than others, some more demanding, some more decent, some smarter, or more communally oriented, or more comforting.

When all is said and done, I think we might have been better off if the great monotheistic religions — Islam, Judaism and Christianity — had never gotten off the ground. Beautifully lucid and full of solace as the idea of one, just God is, imagine for a moment if history had gone a different way, and we’d all remained pagans of, say, the Greek sort.

As modern-day pagans, we’d each be lovingly maintaining a little altar in the corner of our living room that would be dedicated to a particular god or goddess. Our closest friends and neighbors would most likely have altars honoring the same god or goddess, but not necessarily. All of us, no matter the particular deities we chose to honor in our own little homes, would honor and respect all the others because they belonged to the pantheon that expressed all of Nature.

Instead of staggering out of bed for that first cup of coffee, we’d start our day by diligently tending to the candles on our altars. Someone like me might place an unopened bag of Doritos or, say, MilkyWays, on my altar, hoping to please my particular goddess of painting. More sophisticated or professional sorts might choose to offer garlic-stuffed olives from Dean and Deluca’s — this would make a nice offering for a god of the banks, for example — or perhaps special imported, aged cheeses from Zabar’s for a household honoring a god of heart surgery.

With hundreds if not thousands of deities being worshipped and a nearly infinite variety of pantheistic expressions throughout the United States and the world beyond, people would find it difficult to wage war over any particular gods. How would anyone figure out who wasn’t religiously the same, since all the gods would in one way or another be overlapping all the other gods, and honored by everyone? They’d all manifest combinations of our yearnings and Nature itself.

For all their internecine warfare, the ancient Greeks with their complex pantheon of gods and goddesses never fought over who believed in what god or goddess. Athena was the big mama goddess in Athens, of course, but all Greeks honored her, and Athenians honored all the other gods — including the mighty Poseidon, whom the Corinthians, for example, adored as their number one god while simultaneously paying due respect to Athena. (Apparently it was a complex deal to be a Greek pagan.)

The pantheon of gods and goddesses asked nothing more of the Greeks than piety. They demanded reverence, respect and honor. Rather than intoning, “Believe in me or ye shall be damned forever,” or “Go and kill the infidel,” or “Conquer in my name,” they said, “Give me a share of your meat and then maybe, just maybe, depending on my mood, I’ll be nice to you.”

No pagans have ever been interested in the great Western project of trying to reconcile reason with religion. Nor do pagans proselytize. Considered as a phenomenon, pagan gods and goddesses always function as lively intermediaries between people and the inchoate, incomprehensible and irrefutable enormity of Nature itself — a Nature that paganism considers to encompass all creation, including the gods themselves.

Each of the great Abrahamic monotheistic religions, on the other hand, offers people a single God as standing behind Nature itself. Yet from the beginning, despite the talk of shared roots in the desert, shared prophets and shared values, the great monotheistic religions have always been pitted against one another. With time, they’ve even splintered into multiple sub-groups that ferociously (and sometimes bloodily) vie with one another over whose deep beliefs are the best and who best understands God, who’s got the best direct access, and whose followers are the true believers.

I’ve finished my cup of coffee and decided not to eat my bag of unopened MilkyWays. Instead, I’ll lay them down on my little altar. Happy Thesmophoria to all.