Although I understand and appreciate your approach the particular examples do not represent particularly good ones:
1: Pascal's Wager:
For an atheist the least convenient possible world is one where testable, reproducible scientific evidence strongly suggests the existence of some "super-natural" (clearly no-longer super-natural) being that we might ascribe the moniker of God to. In such a world any "principled atheist" would believe what the verifiable scientific evidence support as probably true. "Atheists" who did not do th...
Formalize this a bit:
"I believe that X’s existence or non-existence can not be rigorously proven."
Where X is of the set of beings imagined by or could be imagined by humans, e.g.: God, Gnomes, Zeus, Wotan, Vishnu, unicorns, leprechauns, Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc. Why is any one of the statements that result from such substitutions more meaningful than any other?
I don't have time to construct a full response, but I would like to hit a couple of points.
Catholics vs. rationalists: An analog seems to be large institutional investors (market makers) vs. small or independent investors. Clearly both kinds of market players (the very big vs. the small) play important roles, but the market makers, well, they have the ability to move the market in different directions because of the strength of their market position. "Following" the market makers is often viewed as a safe bet (i.e. a cheap risk computation) for... (read more)