No one realizes God through fixation on "reward" and "punishment" - rules and regulations and laws and codes and creeds: all dogma and doctrine, binding one to a belief. Belief is not faith and faith is not realization. Belief is "taught-religion", faith is at least something like conviction, but neither of these is realization. Realization or Knowledge of God can only come through love, and through nothing but love. Everyone is on the path, whether atheist or fundamentalist.
Ultimately love is its own reward because it bestows a sovereignty which no dogma ever will. Nor does its mere absence mean God wants to "punish" one. Hopefully we mature, because love is mature. Love is objective, non-sentimental, stimulating one to love more and to give oneself into it. I've seen more humanity, more empathy and openness among some "non-believers" than among any hard-core fundamentalists of any faith, Muslim, Jewish or Christian. Envy, spite, judgment from fear & loathing of the "other", supremacy and self-pity based together on a deeply insecure self-loathing which extends outward.
Every mystic from any tradition knows this, that's why they recognize each other right away when encountered, but are respectively never understood or recognized by those in their own traditions who are still ruled by dogma and doctrine, by hope of "winning paradise" and fear of "courting hell"...
The mystic doesn't love God because s/he believes in God, s/he believes in God precisely because s/he loves God, call that what one likes, God-Goddess-AllThatIs. The mystic might then say, reversing the logic of this world: "I believe (or place my trust) only in That which I love, and I can only love That because I know That." This is why the mystics demonstrate "remembering God" - not like remembering your car keys, but in going back into a deep and intimate knowing, perhaps first only sensed, then followed - and this is really religion - a knowing of one's own origin and source of Being. And how can one not love That?
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