It’s Hotter Than Ever . . .HELL, : After years of neglect, Hades is making a comeback. But it’s been remodeled a bit.

Just when it seemed safe to enter the afterlife, eternal damnation has returned.

That glowing light at the end of the tunnel, the story goes, might be a blast furnace.

Hell--after practically vanishing from public thought in recent decades--is making a comeback in a rush of new books, philosophical debates and accounts of near-death experiences.

It also has been remodeled.

Since Dante left, the place has been overhauled by everyone from Catholic priests and a Tennessee cardiologist to Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson. The result: a state of the art Hades with such innovations as constant psychological torment, a skyscraper-sized human popcorn popper, and unending Muzak and mimes.

Its location has changed, too. During the 1700s, scientists theorized that hell was on the sun or aboard a comet. Today, theologians believe it less a place than a spiritual state. Then again, it might be underneath western Siberia. In 1990, the wacky Weekly World News reported that Soviet engineers found hell there while drilling for oil. They allegedly sealed it off after smelling smoke and hearing the wails of the damned.

Whatever and wherever it is, says historian Alan Bernstein, hell ranks as one of history’s most influential concepts.

And one of its most misunderstood.

“The popular image of hell has next to nothing to do with the doctrine of it,” says Father Augustine DeNoia, a theologian for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops: Not only is it flame-free, but people who go there do so by choice.

“God isn’t some vindictive judge sending humans to a place of punishment,” he explains, echoing the views of mainline Protestants and conservative evangelicals. “If that were the case, he would be a monster.”

So, then, what is hell and who ends up there? That question has been argued for centuries.

The latest Christian thinking locates Hades in some sort of invisible dimension. If souls don’t occupy space as we know it, theologians reason, neither does hell.

“It exists, but it’s not a place,” says Biola University philosophy professor J.P. Moreland, co-author of “Immortality: The Other Side of Death.”

“It’s like numbers. They’re real, but no one knows where they are.”

Therefore, hell’s pain is more spiritual than physical. “It’s like the misery of a broken love,” DeNoia says. “Suppose you marry a (superficially) very attractive man or woman, only to find out later that (he or she) married you just for your money. And suppose that, in order to marry this person, you gave up someone who really loved you. The pain you’d feel in knowing you chose the wrong person is what hell is like.”

In the same way, he says, people who choose a life apart from God’s love will spend eternity quarantined from him, knowing they made the wrong choice.

Can’t they change their minds once they realize their mistake?

The answer is complicated--and controversial.

For starters, says Moreland, God wants people to choose him freely, which becomes impossible after death: “At that point, it’s not really a choice to be with God. It’s merely an attempt to avoid hell.”

Also, people who end up in hell don’t want to be with God. The decisions they’ve made in life and the kind of person they’ve become don’t fit in with him, DeNoia says: “They’d be like fast-food addicts in a great French restaurant.”

Hell hasn’t always been so difficult to define.

In ancient Greece, the damned simply spent eternity lying face down in a swamp of mud and frogs. Later, Plato spoke of a place of “temporary punishment for the curably wicked and eternal punishment for the incurably wicked.”

The Jewish concept of hell grew out of frustration with injustice, says Bernstein, a University of Arizona history professor who teaches a class on Hades and who wrote “The Formation of Hell,” a newly released first volume of a planned hell trilogy.

It was obvious that people were getting away with sin in this life, he explains, so some Jews (around the 2nd Century BC) began looking for punishment in the next one.

Enter Gehenna, named for a dump near Jerusalem where garbage and animal carcasses were cast into fires. Although not mentioned as an afterlife destination in Jewish scriptures (all the dead--good and bad--were consigned to a shadowy underworld called Sheol), Gehenna soon evolved into “a cosmic disposal site for the wicked,” Bernstein says.

It was Christianity, however, that truly perfected hell and put it on the map.

Actually, the New Testament is surprisingly vague about the subject. The apostle Paul barely mentions it, and other references--including statements by Jesus--describe little more than a “lake of fire,” “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” “outer darkness” and a “worm that never dies.”

Theologians, artists and writers fleshed out the details.

Almost immediately, Bernstein says, “people began trying to chip away at the absoluteness of eternal damnation.” An early text called the Vision of Paul, for instance, describes a divine visit to hell in which Jesus gives the damned Sundays off in honor of his resurrection.

Origen of Alexandria, meanwhile, suggested in the 2nd Century that hell’s torments and God’s mercy would eventually lead everyone--even Satan--to redemption. Three centuries later, he was excommunicated by the Catholic church for his trouble, and “to make sure that he was properly serving his time, subsequent synods (of bishops) in 553, 680, 787 and 869 (also) damned him to eternal flames,” says Alice K. Turner, fiction editor for Playboy magazine, in her new book, “The History of Hell.”

With Origen disposed of, Hades sprang to life.

It became “like a hit Hollywood movie that gets remade over and over, each time catering to the tastes of a new audience,” says one reviewer of Turner’s survey.

The Jesuits, for instance, made hell “unbearably, suffocatingly, repulsively crowded . . . (with people) pressed together like grapes in a wine-press . . . (and) no latrines,” Turner writes.

Another Catholic order, the Redemptorists, promised that anyone sent there would become “a furnace of fire. . . . If he touches, sees (or) breathes, he touches, sees (or) breathes only fire. He will be in fire like a fish in water. . . . His heart will burn in his bosom, his brains in his head, his blood in his veins, (and his) marrow in his bones.”

Bernstein calls that the carrot-and-stick approach to salvation: Heaven was the reward, hell was the deterrent. “We may find that crass,” he says. “But theologians in the Middle Ages readily admitted it. . . . Hell shaped people’s decisions in all kinds of ways.”

In modern times, however, hell has fallen from grace. Theologians have challenged its existence. Clergymen have dropped it from sermons. And Origen’s theory of universal salvation seems more popular than ever.

But in the 1990s, a hell renaissance seems to be taking shape. U.S. News & World Report ran a cover story on Hades in 1991. A Catholic bishop in New York recently warned Gov. Mario Cuomo of a “serious risk of going to hell” for supporting legalized abortion. And even the 1990 hit movie “Ghost” contained scenes of dark forces dragging evildoers off to unseen torment.

“It’s one of the most powerful symbols in our collective psyches,” Bernstein says. “Everyone knows what hell is, even if they don’t believe in it.”

But apparently, they do. According to a 1991 Gallup Poll, 60% of Americans believe in hell, up from 54% in 1965.

Religious historian Martin Marty of the University of Chicago dismisses those results: “More people believe in hell than they did a few years ago, but that’s because more people believe in everything than they did a few years ago--angels, UFOs. . . . (The real test is whether) they do anything about the belief. If they think hell is real, they should be out there 21 hours a day trying to save people. But they aren’t.”

Indeed, the Gallup Poll found that only 4% of Americans think they’re going to hell.

That may be because so many people are laughing about it.

In the Far Side cartoons, the gates of hell have been transformed into a pair of doors (labeled “Damned If You Do” and “Damned If You Don’t”), the coffee is always cold (“Oh man!” says one denizen, “They thought of everything!”) and new inductees are greeted by the reminder: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

David Letterman, meanwhile, lists hell’s “Top Ten Headlines,” including “Most Residents Prefer Flame-Broiling to Frying,” “Ice Water Canceled--Again!” and “Authorities Announce: Everything to Feel ‘Itchier.’ ”

Yet another hell, described by Baltimore Sun columnist Kevin Cowherd, features accordion music piped in everywhere and mandatory attendance at daily mime performances.

Some of the funniest depictions of Hades are in an unproduced screenplay making the rounds in Hollywood: Todd Durham’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Hell.” The gags include a Motel of the Damned with “Hawaii Five-O” on every channel, and a simple sign on the gates of hell: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Do not back up, severe tire damage.”

Nevertheless, a case can be made that Hades is being taken more seriously.

At least four books on the subject have come out since 1992, and U.S. News reports that some leading divinity schools are having a fresh look at hell.

Most intriguing, perhaps, are accounts of “near-death” experiences in which people brought back to life after “dying” describe journeys to hell.

Gary R. Habermas, a philosophy professor at evangelist Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., says he has investigated dozens of such stories. Habermas, co-author of “Immortality,” says some people remember “finding themselves in a very confused state, either alone or with other spirits who were bewildered, depressed or in despair. (But) there is no torture and no evil beings.”

Others describe a more classical hell: “A lake of fire with demons who whip them and make them carry around piles of bricks or other meaningless loads.”

Habermas says Tennessee cardiologist Maurice Rawlings, who also has written on the subject, reports witnessing patients wake up on the operating table screaming that they were in hell. But when he asks them about it several days later, they’ve forgotten the experience.

Based on that, Rawlings estimates that up to two-thirds of people revived from clinical death may be repressing a hell experience.

Most near-death researchers don’t accept Rawlings’ numbers, Habermas says, but none question that some people have taken post-mortem journeys to hell.

Scientists, however, argue that a physiological mechanism triggers all near-death episodes. Habermas disputes that theory (he says it doesn’t explain how blind people revived from death correctly describe colors and other visual details in operating rooms), but concedes that visions of heaven or hell appear to be shaped by cultural factors.

Author Carol Zaleski’s scholarly analysis of near-death journeys in medieval times, for example, found a strong emphasis on the torments of hell, apparently a reflection of religious beliefs in that era.

And so the debate continues.

In the latest argument, a sort of updated take on Origen, several prominent theologians have sharply attacked the doctrine that hell’s sufferings last forever.

A deity who would allow eternal torment is “more nearly like Satan than like God,” one evangelical suggests. “It would amount to inflicting infinite suffering upon those who have committed finite sin. It would go far beyond an eye for an eye.”

The solution? God eventually snuffs out of existence everyone in hell. In support of this view, “annihilationists” cite New Testament passages about a “second death” and Jesus’ warning to “not be afraid of (men), who can kill the body but not the soul. Rather, be afraid of (God), who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Traditionalists counter with other Bible passages and insist that God would never destroy his own creations.

Even historian Bernstein, who is Jewish, says scholarly attempts to water down the doctrine of hell are misguided: “What are you going to do? Say Jesus didn’t mean it (when he talked about hell)? Or that his statements are falsely attributed to him? . . . (And what about the Book of Revelation), which talks about a lake of fire and brimstone and ‘the smoke of their torment will rise forever and ever and they will not rest?’ I don’t know how else to interpret that.”

Alan W. Gomes, a Biola University professor, agrees. “If we gladly embrace (Christ’s) teachings when he speaks words of comfort and of life, must we not also receive, with all due solemnity, (his teachings about) judgment, perdition and hell?” Gomes asked in a recent issue of Christian Research Journal.

Says Bernstein: “If every king has his palace and every palace has its dungeon,” then Christianity’s dungeon has to be hell.

Global Visions of Hell

In one form or another, hell figures into the beliefs of almost every major world religion.

Hinduism: Souls on the way to reincarnation must first stop off in one of 21 Hindu hells to be purged of bad karma. Among the tortures: getting cooked in a jar or eaten by crows.

Islam: Given this faith’s harsh temporal punishments, one might expect a particularly horrendous Hades. Instead, Muslim hell is remarkably similar to other abodes of the damned. After death, each soul must follow the Path, a narrow bridge leading to Paradise. Those who are judged unworthy fall off into a crater of fire. Some believe that the flames are literal; others consider them figurative, says Maher Hathout, chairman of the Islamic Center of Southern California. The Koran doesn’t say whether hell is eternal.

Buddhism: Tibetan Buddhism lists eight cold hells, while Classical Buddhism speaks of seven hot ones--complete with torture chambers, flaming pits and quagmires. Buddhists don’t believe in souls, so the torments are experienced by a person’s five senses.

Jainism: This Hindu spin-off might hold the record for most hells--8.4 million.

Judaism: Until the 18th and 19th centuries, Hades was a common fixture in Jewish religious thought. Although Hebrew scriptures didn’t specifically mention a place of eternal punishment, rabbinical tradition from about 200 BC forward developed an elaborate concept of afterlife torment called Gehenna. Early literature depicted sinners boiling in human excrement or being flayed and burned; later interpretations allegorized the threat, says Richard Hecht, a religious studies professor at UC Santa Barbara. In the 1700s, philosophers began arguing that hell didn’t conform to the idea of a merciful God. Today, with the exception of Judaism’s Orthodox branch, Jews have abandoned the ideas of hell and an afterlife.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Americana, U.S. News & World Report, interviews.