I'm fairly sure I've felt my ethical caution emotion activating when it really wasn't warranted by the situation. When I'm not dealing with an ethical question, I'm capable of overcoming it with significant effort. But when I am dealing with an ethical question I generally listen to that emotion rather than fighting it (hence why I wouldn't rob banks for the greater good even if I expected not to get caught).

I think a large part of the reason why a lottery with a 1 in 1 billion chance of destroying the world alarms me is that it implies someone built a world-destroying machine to connect to the lottery. Machines turn on accidentally fairly often. I've seen it happen more than once.

I'm not sure if this thought will come out right. But I recently had demonstrated to me that the Sequence on cults was actually onto something true beyond the scope of this community, not just an evil genius persuading me his cult isn't what it looks like. It's a relief, in a way.

I'd previously seen some unthinking allegations of cultishness in the LessWrong community, ones that looked exactly like the instinctive flinches from weird beliefs I'd read about. But I was on some level worried I'd been taught to unthinkingly dismiss valid criticism. I recently saw an allegation of cultishness around here that didn't seem unthinking, and it was uncomfortable to consider, and I'll have to look into whether I believe it or not, but I'm relieved I can tell the difference. 

Whether or not y'all're a cult, there's some good ideas here and I'm glad to have learned them.

If erasing the memories were done by artificially stimulating the mechanism that causes normal forgetting, I think they'd be the same person. After all, I don't consider myself a new person whenever I forget something. But maybe there's something I'm missing. 

I don't know if this will help, but I was noticeably better at thinking fairly about uncomfortable hypotheses for a while after some experimentation with psychedelics. That's actually when I realized I was trans. Maybe if the theists in question are the sort of people who use the right sort of drugs, you might want to try revisiting your discussion when they've been artificially made more able to consider frightening propositions.

On the other hand, those few months of being more open-minded were also a few months where I kept finding myself believing supernatural things that didn't make any sense. And I don't (as far as I know) have a very strong predisposition toward supernatural beliefs. So you probably shouldn't encourage your friends to drop more acid than they would without your interference; the nudge toward spiritual delusions might well do more harm than the openmindedness did good.

I think I agree with you about our invented reasons for instinctive emotional reactions being a big part of our experience of the emotion. I once had a panic attack from having to do some public speaking, but because I'm not consciously scared of public speaking, it felt to me like my adrenal glands had malfunctioned and pumped me full of adrenaline for no reason at all. 

I anticipate that if anyone ever gives me an unnecessary dose from an Epi-Pen it'll feel quite similar. It was uncomfortable, but I knew nothing I find horrible would happen to me, so it was much easier to bear gracefully than some other anxiety I've experienced.