Religious texts, also known as scripture, scriptures, holy writ, or holy books, are the texts which various religious traditions consider to be sacred, or of central importance to their religious tradition. Many religions and spiritual movements believe that their sacred texts are divinely or supernaturally revealed or inspired.

The oldest known religious texts are Pyramid texts of Ancient Egypt that date to 2400-2300 BCE. The earliest form of the Phoenician alphabet found to date is the inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblos. ( The Sumerian Temple Hymns ). The Epic of Gilgamesh from Sumeria is also one of the earliest literary works dating to 2150-2000 BCE, that includes various mythological figures. The Rigveda of Hinduism is proposed to have been composed between 1700–1100 BCE making it possibly the world's oldest religious text still in use. The oldest portions of the Zoroastrian Avesta are believed to have been transmitted orally for centuries before they found written form, and although widely differing dates for Gathic Avestan (the language of the oldest texts) have been proposed, scholarly consensus floats at around 1000 BCE.^{[citation needed]}

Robert Keith "Bob" Rae, PC, OC, OOnt, QC, MP (born August 2, 1948) is a Canadian politician. He is the Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre and interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. From 1990 to 1995, he was Premier of Ontario.

Rae was a New Democratic Party (NDP) Member of Parliament from 1978 to 1982. Then he moved to provincial politics, becoming leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party from February 7, 1982 to June 22, 1996. He served as the 21st Premier of Ontario from October 1, 1990 to June 26, 1995, and was the first person to have led a provincial NDP government east of Manitoba. While in office, he brought forward a number of initiatives that were unpopular with many traditional NDP supporters, such as the Social Contract. Rae's subsequent disagreement with the leftward direction of the NDP led him to resign his membership and join the Liberals.

In 2006, he was a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, finishing in third place on the third ballot. He had originally been a Liberal in the 1970s before joining the NDP. Rae returned to the Canadian House of Commons on March 31, 2008 as a Liberal MP after winning a March 17, 2008 by-election holding the riding that had previously been held by Liberal Bill Graham. He was re-elected in the 2008 general election. Rae ran again as a candidate for the party leadership but withdrew on December 12, 2008. He was re-elected in the Toronto Centre riding in the 2011 general election and was named interim leader of the Liberal Party weeks later, replacing Michael Ignatieff.

Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey (born 20 April 1963) is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology, and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). He is perhaps best known for his view that human beings could, in theory, live to lifespans far in excess of that which any authenticated cases have lived to today.

De Grey's research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can thwart the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS), a tissue-repair strategy intended to rejuvenate the human body and allow an indefinite lifespan. To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage.

De Grey is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, the American Aging Association, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and an advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He has been interviewed in recent years in a number of news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, the BBC, The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, The Washington Post, TED, Popular Science, The Colbert Report, Time, and the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.