Hell occurs in three headlines: 'Hell is around the corner'...'My booze hell'... and 'her TV sitcom hell'. It's been a good month for Hell all round. But for all sorts of reasons, Hell is not the place it was

There was a minor flurry of moral consternation a week or two ago, when a computer game company launched its new advertising campaign. "Go to Hell," read the poster's fiery letters, "You Deserve It."

One of those was tactlessly put up opposite a Bolton church, the vicar of which took a dim view of this infringement of his ecclesiastical franchise. The objection, I take it, was to the frivolity of the message, the implicit indifference to that infernal allusion. Or perhaps it was simple embarrassment at a notion which the Church of England doesn't like to talk about much these days.

As it turned out, it's been a good month for Hell all round, though its recent ubiquity raises some interesting questions about our current moral vocabulary - the difficulty we now have in talking about extremes of good and evil.

The end of the Rosemary West trial, for example, provided the occasion for a rather old-fashioned deployment of the word, used to suggest an ultimate of perdition and punishment. Writing in the Daily Mail, Colin Wilson concluded that West was "guilty as hell - which is where she surely belongs". While the Sun splashed on its front page with the headline "Burn In Hell".

The Sun went to town with infernal references, with a feature inside called "Rose's Ride Into Hell", and a leader-page cartoon which showed the Devil sending a junior demon to tell Frederick West that his wife would be delayed in joining him. But it wasn't just the tabloids who resorted to satanic curses. The Daily Telegraph's report included the headline "Vision of hell was laid bare by survivors", and this newspaper described the West's marriage as being "made in hell".

I don't imagine that any of the writers responsible for these lines really believe that there is such a place - the Tory right-winger's dream of the ultimate punitive sentence, an infinite sharp shock. They were just groping for a means to express the outer limits of human wickedness. But in doing so, they kept coming up against the depleted nature of the word, and not just because it is already a journalistic cliche. For all sorts of reasons, Hell is not the place it was.

You can get a sense of its broad decay as a threat by looking at the most recent edition of The Face magazine, as good a register as any of the current or coming culture. Hell occurs in no less than three headlines: "Hell is around the corner", for an article about the increasing vogue for heroin; "My booze hell", for a light-hearted article about female drinking; and then a strapline about an actress escaping from "her TV sitcom hell".

In the first, the word has a serious, admonitory force - they mean Hell is hell. In the second, the reference is jocular, an ironic reference to tabloid style which has a give-me-a-break insouciance. In the third, it carries barely any weight at all - "hell" is just a pain in the butt, and not for eternity either.

It may be that Hell has been afflicted by the inverted moral language of youth culture, in which "wicked" and "bad" carry an opposite sense to their conventional meaning. These forms began with jazz music (the earliest instance of "bad" in an approbatory sense in the OED is from 1928), but they've attained much wider meaning recently, and in doing so they have, however slightly, blurred our ability to talk about ethics. If a judge were to describe the actions of a young ram-raider as "totally wicked", he would probably get a smirk of surprised approval from the dock.

And even Hell shows signs of straying across the formerly clear border between bad and good. Another recent advert, for a new type of rum, carries the slogan "Distilled in Hell" against a background of leaping flames. This seems to me to be at odds with existing idiom, as seen in the "from Hell" construction, which can be attached to virtually any person (nanny, lodger, mother-in-law) and which usually indicates disgust and contempt. If somebody said to me that they had just drunk the rum from Hell, it would summon up a picture of a retching figure trying to get the taste out of his mouth.

The advertisers presumably hope to appeal to an "I can-take it" bravado in its consumers: perhaps their target market is the sort of people who eat vindaloos in order to demonstrate their masculine superiority to pain. But they also inadvertently show how tepid the idea of eternal damnation has become. If Hell is cool, why should anyone worry about going there?