Are there religions besides certain sects of Christianity wherein member sometimes have visions of God or other holy figures? Do any Jews ever claim visions? Muslims? Hindus? If so, what are they of?
Is there anything in any religion that is analagous to claims of stigmata? I don’t mean specifically claims of injury without physical cause, but more broadly - just signs, marks, or other things that are both claimed to be naturally unexplainable, and that happen to the purest and most devout adherents?
Offhand, I’d say that in Buddhist societies, the more mystical religious experiences are relegated to the native animistic/shamanistic belief systems with which Buddhism inevitably coexists (e.g., Daoism, Shintoism, Animism, the Bon religion of Tibet . . .). I do know that you’ll find possessed mediums and flagellants in Taiwanese Daoist culture, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some sort of stigmata appeared as evidence of contact with the spirit world.
What I’d say is different is that in Asian societies, the kinds of behavior you describe inhabit the shadowy fringes of religious life, rather than holding its place as the centerpiece of a society’s belief system.
Obviously, religious beliefs that have shamanistic or animistic traits include some form of vision or “trip.”
A lot of cultural traditions assign some significance to various birth marks, deformities, or even particular traits (eye color, hair color, whatever). As far as a phenomenon similar to stigmata, I’m stumped. It would seem to me that stigmata resonates well with a hemocentric religion like Christianity, but the vast majority of religions either: 1) don’t really talk about blood, or 2) actively spill it in ceremonies (human or animal blood). Christianity has a blood symbolism going that I doubt any other religion shared (maybe the Aztecs), so just bleeding for no reason would probably not impress anyone else.
Generally, though, probably all religions have a core belief somewhere of communion with the supernatural.
There are stories of visions all the way up to the present day in pretty much all religions. Visions also date back to the ancient world. They are by no means restricted to one religion.
In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, Prince Arjuna rides to war against the Kauravas with Lord Krishna as his charioteer. The Kauravas are actually his cousins and he sees a lot of his family members in the enemy ranks. Grief-stricken at the thought of having to fight and kill people he loves, he seeks guidance from God. Lord Krishna then reveals himself in his transcendent avatara as the Lord Vishnu. Arjuna is given a vision of the infinite universe and the higher self, and Vishnu reveals to him the yoga, which teach union with God, in the song that is the Bhagvad Gita.
This is just one of countless examples that I can give you from Hindu mythology. If you want something more prosaic, along the lines of current-day people having ‘visions’, well that’s a little less mainstream. In my part of India (Gujarat), for example, there are occasions such as mass prayer ceremonies, where every once in a way a divine spirit will ‘enter’ someone, sending them into rapture. They then become a temporary oracle until the spirit leaves them.
As far as I am concerned, though, this is probably the combined effects of mind-altering drugs and devotion-induced emotion, rather than divine providence.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of an analog to stigmata in Hindu mythology. However, given the vastness of the belief system, there’s bound to be something or the other. Maybe someone with more knowledge (and a better memory) will come along and give some details.
More generally, the usual definition of “religion” is the set of beliefs in the supernatural – those attributes outside the natural world, not therefore testable by science, and therefore determinable as truth only by faith, not evidence.
Contrast with “science”, which is a set of processes for determining truths (or more strictly predictive probablity) in the natural world – those for which an experiment can be (at least in principle) designed and a hypothesis tested.
(On a side note, these domains do not overlap: hence science is not a religion, and the two systems are entirely compatibly. A huge number of flamewars could be eliminated by merely noting that these systems aren’t even looking for the same kind of truth. The confusion of atheism as not being a religion causes some of this, see below.)
So in a sense, all religions make supernatural claims.
Even atheism makes a supernatural claim: that “there is no supernatural world.” This is a religious belief since it is a statement about the (non) existence of something outside the natural world, for which no test can be devised.
I believe the more intellectual schools of Buddhism claim to have a humanistic, rational, and more or less scientific basis for their belief systems. I’ve often wondered whether Buddhism in its strictest definition should be considered a religion at all.