Ok.. so I am a newbie at all this. But I have had several villagers die on me and now they just lay there in the middle of the village decomposing. How the heck do you bury them????

Once you have your spirital points they will come and collect them and put them in the burial aea

Getting spirituality will take care of those rotting corpses...eeewww. Once you have the necessary level, take a villager for a walk and see if they can discover the graveyard. THEN, they will take it upon themselves to bury the dead.
On another note, the corpses won't pose a problem to your other villagers (disease)- they just look kinda creepy!

Oh Thank goodness. I was worried about disease running rampant. I have been dragging everyone I can to the Medicine cactus because I am sure that has to be important. But Tech points to get more spirituality are hard to get. I finally got level 3 harvesting and have so much food that it is spoiling.

Level 3 harvesting is very important! Especially if you have lots of little villagers to feed!
Medicine is also a nice thing to have if and when your people get sick- Having a master heals them faster, but anyone can heal someone else.

Points do start out slow, but as you get villagers with better research skills, they will actually gather those points even faster!! Make sure you have at least 2 or 3 (or more if you can spare them!!) working at that research table.. you'll get points in no time!

when someone dies of sickness, you can have a healer gain experience by dragging them over to the corpse and they will try to heal them