I'm Hemmant-Metta and I'm Jessica Blumpty and you're listening to the podcast for

Friendly atheist.com you can now listen to all of our episodes and see show notes

at friendly atheist podcast.com.

So I'm here today at the American Atheist Convention 2015 in Memphis with Jennifer Michael Hecht.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me.

So you're the author of a couple of books and I would love to talk to you about them.

Your newest one is called Stay.

And it's about suicide.

Yeah, the subtitle is a history of suicide and the arguments against it.

A history of suicide, that's such an interesting tact to take.

Yes, and it was quite fascinating to find out how people's ideas about it changed over time.

But this was always very much a secular argument against suicide.

A secular argument, and how would that differ from like a religious argument?

Obviously there's the afterlife to consider, I suppose.

Well, more a question of religious people in the, it was not always thus, but by the middle ages,

Christianity was very against suicide and so people who

wanted to dissuade others from doing it could really just say God doesn't want you

to do it. Indeed it was a worse crime than murder. It was understood as a worse crime than murder it was understood as a worse sin than

murder. So what inspired writing this book? Well I lost two friends.

I'm sorry to hear that.

We were not extremely close, but that's at this point, right?

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