There's nothing in the least odd about it.

Agreed. But anything that strives for an elite righteous opposition in the face of the excellence of peer-reviewed falsifiable common or garden existence is most decidedly odd.

For all we can know, most living things are much closer to the creator than we.

There is no creator; nature creates itself and knows nothing of religion. As the poet said:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, #32)