It's not a knee-jerk reaction, but more like a visceral rejection. The thought of this community becoming something with the feel of the church I grew up in makes me feel sick, and if it happened I would walk away and never look back. This is certainly a bias, but I would still do it.

I noticed your comment about being ex-Mormon after I wrote the grandparent. Even without that context, but especially with it, this is reasonable, and a good warning signal for us to look out for. Please try to give us a heads-up if we start getting close to that point, too, ok?

In a more general sense, I do think it's important to keep the look-and-feel of any organizational structure we put together different from the general look-and-feel of churches. I see a few advantages to this, most obviously that it will avoid driving away non-rationalist atheists and it will help remove us from direct competition with churches so that people who 'already have a religion, thanks' don't see that as a reason not to check us out.

We need to have a clear and concise list of taboos, skills, and beliefs that we want to make into norms, and then the whole community has to talk them over and make sure that we really, really want to make them into our norms. If we're going to start adopting practices from other groups, I believe this should be our highest priority.

Absolutely.

Also note: None of the above is intended as an actual endorsement of any particular plan. We should figure out what we might do before we decide whether to do that thing, as far as I'm concerned, and we're still in the first stage of that.