Um, we don’t have to postulate a child who was coached to accuse a guy in another village of murder to explain the story.
Rather whole story is made up. Either the guy who wrote the book made it up and attributed it to his friend, or his friend made it up and told it to the author.
Trying to find rational explanations for fantastic stories goes back to ancient Greece. Euhemerism - Wikipedia. But making up rational explanations for fantastic stories is making up stories too. The most likely explanation for a fantastic story is that somebody made it up.
I can’t say I believe in reincarnation but I have to admit I enjoy some of the stories associated with it. Dreams can often feel like a window into another life. I have a little piece of me that likes to believe some kind of consiousness may be transferable. I have had two reoccuring dreams that seem to reinforce this but I admit weakly.
I can’t speak for Muslims, but reincarnation is not considered to be outside the mainstream of belief in Judaism. It may not be as central to the religion as it is in Hinduism, but there’s plenty of legitimate rabbinic sources for the belief that it CAN happen.
I have developed a simple mathematical formula for detecting bullshit like the OP’s article: For every “weaselly” word like “should”, “say”, “possible”, “allegedly”, etc (including the naming of vague sources), in a statement, I assign a 25% chance of the statement being true.
Then I just multiply the odds together, then subtract the product from 1 to determine the odds of the article being complete bullshit.
Odds of this being complete BS = 1-(.25*.25*.25*.25*.25*.25)
=1-(.00024414)
=99.975%.
