I used to be more vocally atheist when I first started studying philosophy, but this has moderated greatly over time. Mostly it's because I realised that the question of whether or not God existed was far less important that what people do with their belief. There are plenty of people who believe things that I think are outrageously implausible and un-grounded by evidence who are kind, honourable and ethical. And there are people who have what seems like a more rational view of many things, but still somehow manage to be arseholes about it.
I do take your point about verifiability of whether or not someone really said something. I've been thinking about this, and when I finish my current slab of academic work, I did want to come back to some implications of where this might go. Spoilers: I think we might have to revisit everything from 'seeing is believing' right up to the uncritical worship of empirical evidence.
Much like with anything in life really. People like to proclaim and profess but at the end of the day, do they live it?
Seeing is believing yet, what one sees is unlikely to be the truth and the evidence omits that which is untestable, unobservable and as of yet, unknown which makes it very limited.