My personal favorite portrait of hell is Jean-Paul Sartre's play, "No Exit."

The basic theme is that there are three people trapped together in a room for all of eternity. One is a lesbian, another a coward, and the third an upper class slut. There are three couches, and each person is assigned to a different couch. The torture is in that each person was specifically chosen, because their "sin" was entirely incompatible with the other peoples' view. They can't kill the others, for any peace of mind, nor can they shut any of the others up without concent. They can't close their eyes, and can't sleep. They're just... trapped with their own thoughts, wallowing in their own self pity and the others' derision.

If you can, find a copy of that play and read it. If you can't read French (I can't either), then find a translation.

Wasn't the idea, before Dante picked up a quill, that hell was nothingness? I thought that Dante was the one that gave it the whole fire and brimstone image? So if it is nothingness, wouldn't it be just like sleeping? Nothing going on at all(to your perception)

I don't know, that's just what I thought.

Well, the pit of fire thing comes from Revelation when Satan and all of his followers are cast into a pit of bubbling sulfur and fire for eternity. I like to get my stuff directly from the source, not philosophers and poets who are speculating. The Bible says that Hell is the complete absence of God. There is an anecdote about a man who was Earthly Rich and a poor blind man. The Earthly Rich guy went to Hell because he rejected/didn't acknowledge God, yet the blind man did. And when he was in Hell, it was described as a dark place with a window into Heaven (think of standing on one side of a bottomless pit with Hell on one side, and Heaven on the other). Yet, try as he might, the Rich Man couldn't reach up to Heaven to know God, although he cried out and pleaded to be let in. There he saw the Blind Man that he had repeatedly shunned. Finally, one of the Angels came to pay a visit, and the Rich Man pleaded to let him go back to warn his friends about the horrors of Hell. This is where the Angel yells at him and says that his friends have the Prophets to warn him, and has plenty of chances to learn and repent. So that's what my belief on Hell is, it is the absence of God, you can't know Him, you can't experience His Love, but you are able to see it. That would be the ultimate torture, to see something that you could have had and be restrained from being it.

A few views on hell that I didn't see mentioned before:

For christians, while the fiery pits and what not are certainly undesirable, the true agony of hell was designed to be the utterly complete seperation from god.

Stanly Elkins, in The Living End, described hell as a place where your nerves grew out of your skin like hair and the amusment park like heaven was just visable beyond the seperating fence.