What if next year's ritual includes chanting thrice unto the heavens a solemn vow not to kill the people who don't go to next year's ritual?

...nah, I don't think anyone wants to to kill or even shun people who don't go to the ritual. Of the top ten LW contributors on the table on the right, only two of them (me and Alicorn) attended, and for me it was a last-second sort of thing. Eliezer didn't go. It would be kind of hard to shun Eliezer and 80% of the top contributors, even if people wanted to. Only a tiny proportion of the community went to the ritual and those who chose not to were in good company.

More philosophically, wouldn't the same complaint apply to having real-life meetups at all (wouldn't it exclude people who prefer to just talk via the Internet?) or writing HPMoR (now non-readers feel left out of a lot of discussions and don't get in-jokes, so they might feel pressure to read it) or CFAR minicamps (people who don't get selected to go might feel like they're less a part of the community). And I know one commenter above managed to find some trivial differences between board game night and ritual night, but the fundamental problem of "What if I don't enjoy this but I feel like I have to go anyway?" remains sound.

I think the road of not doing fun things that most people want because someone who doesn't want to do it might feel left out leads to sitting quietly in a dark room. And the road of never doing community cementing things because people might be outside them leads to never trying to cement the community. And I think that the ritual, in this case, is being held to a much higher standard than any other activity of this sort just because it sounds kind of weird.