"as you know bill, I argue that religious devotion does not only relate to theism, but atheism also. "

As YOU know, this really bothers myself & others. You are trying to imply that it is 'denial' of God. A-theism simply means 'not theism'. It is merely the absence of belief. The assertion by theists is that there is a God. A-theists say "you haven't convinced me, and I will not be convinced without a different kind of evidence than you offer." They don't begin with a claim... they respond to a claim. Theists assert... atheists resist. (Agnostics do have sort of an opinion... "it might be and it might not")(Skeptics, like myself, distrust certain ideas by the way they are defined and expressed.)

And calling God an eyewitness is a gross form of assuming what you wish to prove. We need and eyewitness TO God... and Moses (if there was a real, historical Moses) seems to us skeptics as having made claims impossible to verify.

"scientific ideas continually change [as you's all rejoice in!] whilst we say that a reliable eyewitness is preferable to mens constantly changing stories."

Rejoice? Not exactly... We just see changing ideas as being honest about the addition of data and analysis. As to "reliable eyewitness"...you can't even get one to most auto accidents! 'Mens constantly changing stories'..... like all those different translations & interpretations of scripture? It simply won't do to assert that the 'first' version was inspired and then some mistakes were made in copying if you don't have and can't identify the first version! If 'mistakes were made', how can you be sure that some basic facts were gotten wrong in the 2nd copy and that '6 days' merely meant "a long time"? etc. etc. etc. And who knows what some copyist thought a leviathan was? Nothing we can identify could both swallow a man and still spit him out.

I guess I will never understand how a group can hold to literal versions of creation when all you'd need is to 'believe' in God and that he made it work like science is discovering.