Green burial techniques are a more recent phenomena, one in which a family chooses to return a loved one’s body to the earth in an environmentally sensitive fashion. Do green graves change the way we mourn? That question assumes that mourning takes the same form for everyone. Yet, we now know that there is no single way to mourn. Some funerals are deeply sad events that focus on the loss; others are joyous celebrations of the life of the departed. Research provides little support for the notion that there is a “right” or “wrong” way to respond to significant losses. There are only different ways.

In all cases, the choice of how to deal with the body of the deceased is intricately tied to the religious or philosophical perspective of the bereaved. In fact, burial decisions may assist the survivors in finding meaning in their loss. Undoubtedly, the individual who chooses to bury a loved one in a green grave has selected an option that is consistent with his or her worldview and life philosophy. It is important that outsiders respect this choice and recognize that this option is not for everyone. The family that selects this path may do so because it helps them make sense of their loved one’s death. Ultimately, such a choice is likely to help them adapt to their loss.

Roxane Cohen Silver is a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

Alan Wolfe is a professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

There is currently a bill in Congress (H.R. 808) that has 72 co-sponsors in the House. Representative Dennis Kucinich has introduced a DOP bill in the past three sessions, and it seems to get stuck at about 70 co-sponsors. However, various versions of a DOP bill have been introduced more than 90 times since the inception of the United States.

There are campaigns to create ministries or departments of peace in many countries. Canada recently introduced a bill for a Ministry of Peace. Japan, Australia, and the United Kingdom have active groups. Three countries already have a Ministry of Peace—Nepal, Solomon Islands, and Costa Rica.

Finally, there is a nationwide grassroots campaign operating in all 50 states with citizen activists lobbying Congress to get support for the DOP legislation.

Yoko Ono has been a big supporter of the DOP campaign and has used her networks to help spread the word and get support for things like the recent Change.org Ideas for Change in America effort. Other celebrities have been supportive, but few have been as committed as Yoko.

Ted Nunn is the Department of Peace campaign coordinator in Maryland.

The relationship between religion and health has been researched frequently over the past 40 years, with most studies finding that religious people tend to live longer and experience better general health. Yet, despite these generally positive associations between religion and health, numerous studies have suggested that those who are more religious may be more likely to be obese.

Our recent study of a large, demographically and geographically diverse population sample confirmed this association; we found that more frequent prayer, more frequent service attendance, and greater spirituality were each associated with a greater likelihood of obesity. Furthermore, these associations remained significant even after adjustment for demographics. In other words, our findings suggest that if we were to blindly choose two people—one religious and one not—who were otherwise identical in terms of race, sex, age, education, and income, the religious person would be more likely to be obese.

The next logical question is: Why are religious people more likely to be obese? First, it is important to note that our study design precludes us from inferring causality; accordingly, when we say religious people are more likely to be obese, we do not mean that religion actually causes obesity. It is entirely possible that the association we have found between religion and obesity exists partly because obese people may, in fact, be more likely to become religious.

Perhaps the most likely explanation for the association between religion and obesity is that religious organizations tend to place little emphasis on avoidance of gluttony or overeating, while instead emphasizing avoidance of more clearly defined practices like smoking. In fact, fellowship around festive meals is common in religious communities and may be viewed by pious individuals as a well-deserved treat for all the time and energy they devote to religious activities. Unfortunately, we’re often hurting ourselves more than we are treating ourselves at these meals, which tend to center around fatty and calorie-dense meats, cheeses, starches, and baked goods.

Yet, even if religious people are more likely to be obese, we know that religious people still tend to live longer and have better general health than nonreligious people do. Given this, should the religious community even care if it is more obese? My answer, without question, is yes. The adverse health effects of obesity are many, including fatal cardiovascular and metabolic disease and nonfatal but disabling respiratory and musculoskeletal problems. Accordingly, if we can do a better job of preventing, recognizing, and treating obesity in the religious community, we are likely to see religious people lead even longer, healthier lives.

Matthew Feinstein is a medical student at Northwestern University.

In short, yes. Design won’t make believers out of atheists, but it can certainly provide conditions for deepening the experience for the spiritually inclined. Researchers studying awe, an emotional state closely linked to transcendence, believe that a key trigger is a sense of vastness. Encountering objects or spaces that are extremely large in scale, from Ayer’s Rock to the Grand Canyon, stimulates what psychologists call a need for accommodation—a need to take this new experience and fit it into our existing mental models, stretching them in the process. As our mental models struggle to accommodate the power behind works of great scale (both natural and manmade), we feel smaller by comparison. Our focus broadens, which effectively minimizes our daily preoccupations. The builders of the great cathedrals, the Angkor temples in Cambodia, and Easter Island’s famous moai statues all understood, whether explicitly or intuitively, the power of great scale to inspire this perspective-shifting, spiritual sense of awe.

Scale can be particularly effective when the exaggerated dimension is height. Earthly existence naturally has a vertical orientation, defined by the gravitational force that holds us to the earth. Upward directionality is associated with lightness, air, and spiritual thoughts, while downward brings connotations of heaviness, earth, and physicality. Some religions conceptualize this vertical dichotomy as a moral one, with heaven above earth and hell below it. And many religions conceive of the spirit as a weightless entity, which is freed upon death from its gravity-bound body. Defying this downward pressure by turning our gaze upward naturally leads many of us to a more spiritual frame of mind. Structures that are upwardly expansive feel more conducive to worship than those with low, dark ceilings. This effect can be enhanced by adorning the ceiling with elements that cause the gaze to drift upward, such as lighting fixtures, ceiling frescos, or skylights.

Turning the gaze upward has another effect: It allows more light into the eye, and light is another aesthetic element that can enhance our spiritual experience. Light is a common metaphor for deities and a proxy for their blessing. In Genesis, God’s first act after creating heaven and earth is to proclaim “Let there be light.” When a religion wins a convert, they say he has “seen the light,” and the object of spiritual quests is “enlightenment.” Many early religions, such as those of ancient Egypt and Greece, featured gods of light or sun as primary deities. It makes sense that light would be so prominent a feature in worship, considering its significance to our survival. Light was certainly on the minds of gothic cathedral builders when they developed the practice of using flying buttresses. By taking pressure off of the walls, these exterior structures allowed for taller, lighter cathedrals with vast expanses of glass windows that were previously impossible. Structures of worship are at their most sublime not just when they’re bright, but when they also call attention to the light and focus our gaze on it. Stained-glass windows are one way architects of religious structures have done this. Others work with natural light. A particularly beautiful example is Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. The cuts in the expansive structure shape the light, giving it form and presence. The result is an expansive space with a transcendent glow.

There are other aesthetics more specific to different religions that can enhance the experience of prayer and spiritual contemplation. Features such as the structure’s shape, color treatments, and level of adornment all vary according to belief systems. But these three elements—scale, height, and light—seem to have deep roots in human nature or cultural practice that make them particularly conducive to achieving spiritual communion. Can you pray meaningfully in a dimly lit, underground cave? Surely the answer is yes. But an expansive, well-lit space is more likely to put you in a prayerful mood.

Ingrid Fetell is a designer and writer currently working on Aesthetics of Joy, a book about design and positive emotion.

I worry about things like education and health care, but I realize that I am now more or less out of the equation, whatever I think. So I don’t bother myself too much. Having said this, at a more personal level, I do care about things I have produced or worked on—be they my children or my books. I care about the country to which I belong, and at some general level, I care about the globe on which I have lived. Nothing is going to last forever, but if I can now do things to help the future, then I am prepared to do so. If I can write something about the environment that is useful, then I will do so.

In fact, at the moment I am writing a book on Gaia, the hypothesis that the world is an organism. Obviously, this does have implications for global warming and such issues. I would lie if I said I am just writing for the future, but I do hope that what I write may help some people in their thinking. So in this sense, I care about the future because generally I care about the things I love right now. And that seems to me to be as good an answer as any.

Michael Ruse is a professor of philosophy and director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University.

In my recent book Annals of Gullibility, I proposed a four-pronged causative theory of gullibility, and of the broader construct of “foolish” (risk-unaware) behavior. The four factors are “situations,” “cognition,” “personality,” and “affect/ state.” A gullible act results from some combination of these factors, with the probability of being duped depending on the number and strength of the forces coming to bear in a given episode.

Situation refers to the strength of the social “pull” to behave gullibly. In a recent affiliation scam targeting Amish, the fact that the scammer was Amish and that leaders of the tight-knit Amish community supported it made it likely that any given member of that group would fall for the scheme. Social pressure also explains why there are few people who join religious sects—even of the more “wacky” kind—different from that of their parents. It also explains why anyone foolish enough to be interrogated by the police without the presence of an attorney is at risk of confessing to a crime, whether or not he or she committed it.

Cognition refers to one’s “tacit knowledge” of the risky actions being proposed or of the nature and motives of those who propose them. Lack of education, naivete borne of worldly isolation (the Amish mentioned above), low social insight (ability to spot deception cues), brain impairment, and low intelligence all increase the likelihood of behaving gullibly. For these reasons, we do not allow children or young adolescents to make certain decisions, and we put protective arrangements in place for vulnerable elderly or impaired individuals. Gullibility is considered by some (such as Richard Dawkins) to be an inherited trait that enables children to survive (by obeying their parents when they tell them to stay out of the road) but which makes them vulnerable to magical and unprovable beliefs, such as the existence of a personal God.

Personality refers to those traits in an individual that incline him or her to say “yes” when self-interest or reality should cause him or her to say “no.” Among these traits are high interpersonal trust, social neediness (loneliness), low willpower, a dependent orientation, low self-esteem, etc. This is a major reason why some people are more gullible than others. But for it to play a role, one or more of the three other factors has to be present. As to why some people are less able to stand up to deceptive social pressure than others, I think childrearing plays a major part. It is for this reason that I believe that certain religious-oriented childrearing experts (John Rosemond, James Dobson, Gary Ezzo) are doing children a disservice when they encourage parents to break their children’s will and deny them the opportunity to become autonomous individuals with their own worldviews and lifestyle preferences.

Affect/state refers to biological factors that push someone to gullible actions or lessen someone’s ability to resist such lures. Examples of affective factors are fear, anxiety, and greed (especially important in falling for Ponzis), while examples of state are exhaustion (why interrogations often start at night), lust, and intoxication. Affective and state factors typically are present when smart people do dumb things, as we are much more likely to behave stupidly when “not in our right mind.”

Gullibility is a complicated phenomenon, for which there are multiple explanations. As a rule, trusting and believing others is the best way to live one’s life. However, survival in the world requires us to recognize and be cautious when signs are present that someone who professes to be our friend is actually the devil in disguise.

Stephen Greenspan is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado and an emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut.

Perhaps on an even more simple level, you could imagine a person performing an act of moral excellence and form mental images of the person and their behavior. In fact, in some of our other work we found that simply thinking of a significant other, and imagining all the ways in which that person is wonderful, produced effects of social support similar to those that are invoked when you actually have a friend stand next to you. That work showed that people judge a hill to be less steep when they have a friend by their side (compared with when they’re alone)—and, interestingly, the same effect occurs after they go through an imagery task during which they think of a person special to them. In other words, thinking of certain things can sometimes be as powerful as “the real thing.”

Simone Schnall is a lecturer in the department of social and developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge.

Has science made anything easier (or better)? Initially, at least in America, folks might be jumping up and saying, “Well, obviously!”

Science has certainly provided some provocative alternative approaches to thinking about the world. OK. How about science’s tangible products: electricity, automobiles, antibiotics, clean water. All good? A lot of good, yes. But look just a tiny bit closer. Electricity expanded our day and allowed the invention and use of countless time-saving life-enhancers, but it took away the night and the night skies (how many of you under 50 have seen the Milky Way? Spent hours with the heavens?). No big loss? Arguable.

Try this: Electricity often comes from burning coal. Mining and burning coal is one of the most destructive human practices on earth. Coal’s a finite resource; its burning pollutes our atmosphere and, along with automobiles’ burning of fossil fuels and the emissions from many other manmade inventions, is destroying our atmosphere and potentially our planet. Electricity can also come from hydroelectric plants that have rearranged our rivers and forests in dramatic fashion. And, of course, much of the world’s electricity is generated from nuclear power.

Science and death are like this.

We’ve gotten good at thwarting death, which can be good, but Western medicine, with close collaboration from science, has invented the following strange idea and carried it out beautifully: Death is failure. We are committed to keeping people alive as long as possible, no matter what. Have you heard the story of a man who was recently resuscitated by EMTs despite the fact that he had “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” tattooed on his chest?

Science and technology have forced us to think about what it means to be dead: When your brain stops? When your heart stops? When you can’t move or respond? And they have inspired us to create ways of measuring these vital signs and to invent ways of reviving them when they stop working.

Remember those guys collecting dead bodies house to house in Monty Python and the Holy Grail? One man being collected is a bit upset. “I’m not dead!” he argues, “I think I’ll go for a walk!” Those were the days.

Arri Eisen is a senior lecturer in biology at the Institute of the Liberal Arts and the Center for Ethics at Emory University.

However, if we observe that high crime and low levels of religious belief or high levels of belief and low crime go hand in hand, how should we interpret that correlation?

One obvious possibility is that religion provides believers with a set of moral values, and because of those values, believers are less likely to engage in criminal behavior. This is the traditional conclusion drawn by studies focusing on the links between religion and crime. Alternatively, it may be the case that once an individual decides to engage in crime, he or she is less likely to want to participate in religious activities. In this case, rather than religion reducing crime, crime leads people away from religion. Furthermore, some third factor, such as age (older people tend to be more religious, and older people commit less crime), might explain both religion and crime. In any of these cases, we would observe a negative relationship between measures of religious belief and measures of crime.

My research points out some of the difficulties in using quantitative approaches to cleanly disentangle the effect of religion on criminal behavior from other social factors that might impact both religion and crime. Similar difficulties plague almost every quantitative study that purports to measure the “effects” of religion on outcomes such as health, parenting, and happiness. Does this mean that religious belief has no impact on attitudes and behaviors?

Not at all. It does mean that scientists should be suitably humble when claiming to measure complex relationships such as those between religion and other outcomes of social processes. Such relationships usually defy the simple characterizations of the popular press that religion “increases” this or “lowers” that. Given the nuanced way in which religious attitudes can interact with individual traits and experiences, community environments, and societal norms, measuring how religion affects and is affected by other behaviors remains a formidable challenge.

Paul Heaton is an associate economist at the Rand Corporation.