... mas, concentrando-nos, agora, nos Cínicos:

Diógenes de Sinope

"It is hard to compile a list of Cynic beliefs as their writings were few and none have survived, and they were in any way confortable with self-contradiction, having no time for dogma or rule books. All we have are the testimonies, usually either bewildered or amused, of others. Typically, however, Cynics mixed austerity in their personal habits with a refreshingly experimental approach to life. (...) The good life required escaping the false prison of social expectations, the tuphos (humbug). A well-known story has Diogenes of Sinope, a leading light of early Cynicism, masturbating in public, capping his performance with the witticism "if only it were possible to relieve hunger so easily".(Battling The Gods: Atheism In The Ancient World - Tim Whitmarsh)

... como, numa saborosa leitura à hora do almoço, é possível descobrir que, sem nunca ter lido os clássicos da Antiguidade mas não vestindo camisola de nenhuma tribo, afinal, sempre se foi (com imenso proveito), simultaneamente, Cínico, Estóico, Epicurista e Céptico

"Do you believe in a countercultural existence that defies society's conventions? You are a Cynic. Or is life best when we dutifully play the hand that fate gives us, whatever it is, to the best of our abilities? In which case you are a Stoic. Or is the aim to remove the stress and anxiety that comes with society's false demands? You are an Epicurean. Or do you reject any kind of dogma whatsoever? In this case you are a Skeptic" (Battling The Gods: Atheism In The Ancient World - Tim Whitmarsh)

"Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical tradition that anyone ever believed that 18th-century Europeans were the first to battle the gods. We tend to see atheism as an idea that has only recently emerged in secular western societies. The rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal. Rather than making judgments based on scientific reason, these early atheists were making what seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion – the fact that it asks you to accept things that aren’t intuitively there in your world. The fact that this was happening thousands of years ago suggests that forms of disbelief can exist in all cultures, and probably always have" (ver também aqui e aqui)