They are not discarding religion, but rather throwing down a challenge to previous conceptions of the divine. The way they do this is fairly nuanced. But things are about to get a lot less subtle with the next philosopher we’ll discuss, Xenophanes. He staged a direct attack on the conception of the gods that we find in Homer and Hesiod. In doing so, he inaugurated a not-always-friendly rivalry between Greek religion and Greek philosophy that will persist right through Plato and Aristotle.
