He was, but he was also talking about government.* Towards the
end he was very critical about the way that government and
institutions (collegiate and corporate) lock away knowledge in
"black boxes", inaccessible to the general public. He didn't
appear to be an atheist per se but rather a skeptic who saw an
open culture of science as being the best defense we have at the
moment against the darkness against whose who control the
information / education / etc of the people. There's been a
long-standing fight within the scientific community between open
access and paid journal (as well as deeper restrictions of
sharing of scientific knowledge via being locked into their
institutions. It was exemplified within computer science culture
by the contrast of Grace Hopper's persistence of an environment
of sharing code vs the corporate and internal military
tendencies to "blackbox" discoveries - either for profit
(corporate) or for a chance for promotion (military -
essentially, a political decision to secrecy... as well as
keeping the budget within their department. But yes, he was also
taking a shot at religion as well I'm sure - and a culture of
ignorance = control in general.
