Our parrish regularly sent out sets of weekly collection envelopes. If I remember right they were serially numbered (so they could track each family's contributions?).
When I was growing up, my parents gave money to our church in serialized envelopes, too, but that was because they had pledged to give a certain amount of money throughout the year and the church's budget was based on that information from all of the people who pledged. There was no penalty if you didn't pay, but they legitimately needed to know if there was going to be a shortfall.
Most of these religions seem to have *some* fiscal component (like giving your neighborhood Tibetan monk a flaming chicken or something).
Well, sure. Almost all organizations require funding. Unless it's some sort of communal club meeting at the food court. Churches have buildings they have to pay for, employees that they have to salary, etc. But most churches don't expect, much less require, your money. Scientology certainly requires your money. Mormonism doesn't require it to attend, but it does require it to get to heaven.
cultishness comes down to: how much does the organization do to hide its actual beliefs from outsiders and newcomers; how much effort do they expend to use front organizations to obscure their activities; do they love bomb newcomers but then persecute defectors when they spit out the hook?
The second of those is just an aspect of the first: hiding true beliefs. There's a term for that: mystery religion. Okay, that really refers to a specific set of Greco-Roman classical religions, but the idea is the same. You have to be a member and work through the ranks to learn what the religion is actually about. Scientology clearly meets that criterion, what with all the Xenu stuff. But Mormonism does, too. After all, it's, in part, a creole of Christianity and notoriously mysterious Freemasonry. It's not nearly as bad as Scientology; I don't think that they hide their ultimate beliefs, just a lot of the random wackiness along the way.
As for persecuting defectors, again, Scientology is the gold standard, but Mormonism has some pretty strong suppression of dissent, too. Yes, it's pretty much limited to being excommunicated, but if your belief is that you will go to hell if you aren't a member of the church, that's pretty severe.
Again, though, I don't really care what kind of crazy nonsense you want to believe as long as you don't force it or its results on anyone else, and you don't coerce people into sacrifice solely for the good of the organization. (And I want to point out that there are certainly legitimate reasons to sacrifice for a group, but there is never a good reason to sacrifice for the organization itself. Sometimes the two things can be the same, but many times they are very distinct.)
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