Do Spiders Have Souls?

In my most recent post I stated that I don't believe in a soul. I would like to expand on that a bit by saying I would like to believe in the concept of a soul, I just have not had any proof yet that a soul does indeed exist. The very fact of life itself is a miracle, and one that most of us really don't understand. I respect life, and if I see a spider in my bathtub or a fly on my living room wall, I don't swat them dead. I prefer instead to catch them on a piece of paper and put them outside. The very fact that they are living creatures makes them unique, perhaps in all the universe. The same chemical reaction in the primordial soup that created life created their lives as well as our own.

Again, this is my opinion only, based on my own beliefs. Please don't lambast me and tell me to do research first. I am not a scientist, nor am I a university-educated intellectual, I am just a person who thinks about these things, and I am probably as well as informed, or uninformed, as most of the rest of us on this particular topic.

However...

If a life form has life, does it also have a soul, or is that unique to the human race only? And if so ... why?

What is a soul? If we have souls, when were our souls created? Before we were born? When we were born? Were our souls created at the very beginning of time, when the universe was born? If our souls are timeless, and we pass on into eternity, why do our souls not remember the eternity we dwelled in before we were born?

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

... Shakespeare, The Tempest

I would love to believe in a soul. I would like to think that the essence of my mother and my father still lives on, perhaps in Heaven, perhaps in some other dimension. I miss them every day. When my mother was alive, I used to telephone her regularly and we would chat for a few minutes. One day recently I called her number -- don't ask me why -- and the phone rang at the other end. A woman picked it up, "Hello?" She sounded just like my mother, and for a moment I was suspended in time, like in the Twilight Zone. It felt as if my soul were connecting with my mother's, and I let the moment last as long as possible before I replied, "Oh, I'm sorry, I have the wrong number". In reality, I knew it was just someone who had been re-assigned my mother's telephone number.

I often wonder, do the spiders in the bathtub and the flies on the wall have souls? They are life forms, and closer to us in chemical makeup than we realize.

Naïve thoughts, perhaps, but something to think about nevertheless...