I have to agree with #3 and I'm not an atheist myself, rather a theist who also thinks that the undue emphasis on customs involved in much organised religion borders on the pharisaic and is precisely what the figureheads of most world religions warned against.
To quote J-J Rousseau:
“Do not let us confuse the outward forms of religion with religion itself. The service God requires is of the heart; and when the heart is sincere that is ever the same. It is a strange sort of conceit which fancies that God takes such an interest in the shape of the priest’s vestments, the form of words he utters, the gestures he makes before the altar and all his genuflections.”

I accept that customs are important to many religious believers and that they are not in themselves a bad thing but I think that ethics should always be at the forefront of religion (as in secular matters as well) and that the practice of customs should not distract anyone from their moral duties. This is a general point, I don’t believe that anything the three people interviewed said implies that they believe otherwise.

I personally have most experience of the Christian church and I believe that a neurotic and unquestioning preservation of some traditions and customs has led to the church getting its priorities mixed up in some cases. In particular, the church’s current obsession with homosexuality and its prioritisation of this ‘issue’ at a time when it could, for example, be working with other religions to unite people and strengthen the worldwide response to the suffering cause by famine and treatable diseases, is unjustifiable and results from a preservation of a homophobic strand that unfortunately existed in the early church.