Did Normal People "Believe" Ancient Myths?

We recently took a walk at Observatory Park in Montville, Ohio. That park has a working observatory, and a trail with lots of little signs and props about the planets. Some of the signs discuss ancient mythology about the stars and planets. For example, one sign says the ancients "believed" the sun was drawn across the sky in a chariot.

I don't think the ancients "believed" things like a modern "believer" in a religion or ideology does.

I think for an ancient person the mythology was much more obviously a story or folk tale like other tales. It might have elements that are "true", i.e. useful or informative, but I don't think any even moderately intelligent person would imagine it was literal verbatim factual information. When they heard the sun was drawn across the sky in a chariot, I think they possibly meant some forces drive the sun across the sky and probably nothing more than that. The chariot and horses just filled in the blanks in a somewhat fanciful way and maybe the whole thing was more of a joke about the limitations on human knowledge than anything.

The "believer" today thinks everything in the jewish bible is literally true and historical to the point people make up stories about global floods and catastrophes that never happened. There's hundreds, probably thousands of videos on youtube discussing such things. Clearly european people had the capacity for "dogmatic belief", otherwise the jewish religion couldn't have been inflicted on them, but there's not enough information from our ancient ancestry to know how and what they thought. It seems like only about 15% of the total population today has the capacity for acting on information they get from their senses and personal experience. It's possible that percentage was higher in the past due to a more demanding environment, but of course that's just wild speculation.

Another group of "believers" strongly buy into what's basically a new religion about trannies, or COVID, or abortion, or global warming. They use the language of priests like "belief" in global warming, or "denier" or global warming, because the mob of people who participate in the new religion are just "believers" rather than knowers.

There's myriad cult-like niche beliefs today as well, like the people with strident views about diet and food, whether they are vegans, or carnivores. There are even people who heavily promote a very high-carb diet too. People promote eating fruit only, etc... Politics is basically two cults of 12 year old mindset retards vying to impose their retard "beliefs" on the other "team".

Anyway, it's all bullshit. People have very limited capacity to create a high fidelity mental model about anything complicated. It takes years of study to become an expert on mundane, boring subjects like how a car engine works. I've been studying local geology for years now as a hobby, and I barely know anything about it. I've only recently come to understand my immediate local landscape for example after studying ODNR well log records and researching northeast Ohio's glacial past.