One of my all time biggest pet peeves with historical(ish) fantasy is when the writer constructs a religion with a clear bias that it’s stupid and false and therefore only the Stupid People and/or commoners believe in it and all the smart/elite main characters are like, quasi-atheists or otherwise just routinely flout established religious conventions of orthodoxy and/or orthopraxy because they’re Too Smart for it or etc.
It’s usually an extension of assumptions that people in the past were just less intelligent than in the contemporary, just being like “I know that the sun is a star millions of miles away that the earth orbits, but this ancient religion describes it as a chariot flying through the sky” and not really bothering to learn the context and just (consciously or subconsciously) settling on ‘that’s a crazy thing to think and was probably believed in because they were Stupid’.
And that whole attitude pisses me off so much. People were as 'smart’ 10,000 years ago as they are today. These beliefs aren’t just desperate, random flailing to explain phenomena that could not directly be accounted for either, it’s not like people just looked at the sun and went “Uhhh I don’t know what the fuck that thing is, actually. I guess it might be a chariot or a boat or something?? Yeah let’s go with that.” and based entire religious practices on this. Every well-established belief system exists within broader contexts of cultural values/subjective perceptions of reality/knowledge systems/etc, and exist as part of a historical continuum of religious practices that came before. Even when not Materially Correct, they have context and internal logic, they’re not always dead literal with zero levels of allegory, and they’re never a result of stupidity.