Mark Salzman: An Atheist in Free Fall

"An invisible spirit controlling our lives"?
'Determinism as a spiritual revelation', and an answer to philosophical anguish?
(Can see why his wife had to bring home the bacon...hope she still has her day job... Note: William James' essay on the utility of regret, and the futility of Determinism is, to my mind, more insightful and to the point.)

He is a great story teller I liked listening to him tell his tale.

the moral was about materialism. He argued through the metaphore of a sick dog that there is no free will. His story tells of the events that lead him to an incredibly awful moment in his life stuck with a sick dog. The picture he draws is a moment of extreme emotional anguish and turmoil, when it would have been human to blame the dog, but he had an epiphany in the idea that it wasn't the dog's fault for being sick. The dog being and sick is just a product of the events that lead to that situation.

which is a metaphore about life and mind

...did that have to do with atheism?

I listened for 21 minutes. What did any of that have to do with atheism?