Ah, OK; so when you said, "...humans are VERY different from any other form of animal life", you really meant, "We're very similar in many ways". To me, these are somewhat contradictory.
We're curious animals, like most mammals. Our cognitive capacities allow us to be curious about not just the world around us, but the past and the future, our origins and endings. Our difficulty with the concept of personal death and wish to avoid it leads us to imagine continuing on somehow, indefinitely. Observed deaths reinforce the idea of the departure of some animating substance or vital force. Our tendency to see agency in the unexplained makes us superstitious, magical thinkers, with a predilection for god beliefs.
But our rational intellectual capabilities have enabled us to demonstrate that superstitions and magical thinking are irrational and ineffective, the result of using simplistic heuristics in the wrong context.
This can't be done for god beliefs (and much of mysticism), because they're generally unfalsifiable, ill-defined, and have no discernable effects in the world; they exploit our overactive instinct for attributing agency & purpose, our apprehension at personal death, and our natural desire for comfort & security. It's hard to let go of a security blanket that wraps your whole life.
[note how attribution of agency is built into our everyday language, e.g. see 'they exploit' in blue above]
Spirit and soul are ill-defined concepts without physical justification, and require some awkward manoeuvring to avoid the 'problem of interaction' and physical law; but if not examined too closely, they're appealingly vague vehicles for the freedom of indefinite persistence.
Most believers prefer not to look too closely, raising faith and unquestioning belief to high virtue, casting doubt as weakness.
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