Consider:
Will every nonbaptized human go to hell, even if he does everything else right?
Is it hell or Hell? Not only in this example sentence, but in general?
Wiktionary has:
Hell:
Hell (Christianity) Alternative spelling of hell. Place of suffering for sinners.
hell:
Proper noun. hell ... (Christianity, uncountable) The place where devils live and where sinners are punished after death.
Whereas the Wikipedia article uses Hell throughout.
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donald remero
[ Moderator ]
It depends ultimately on the context and the rhetorical intentions of the author/publication.
Capitalization of "Hell" reinforces notions, attitudes and opinions of Hell as the proper name for a real and specific place. Non-capitalization of "hell" reinforces concepts of hell as a common noun that encompass ideas of hell as a state of being as opposed to a specific place, a generic term for the pan-cultural locations (and pseudo locations) such as Gehenna, Pandemonium, Tophet, etc., (which are regularly capitalized), and "hell" as an abstract notion that does not exist in a literal form.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary uses only the uncapitalized form and make no mention of "hell" or "heaven" as being capitalized.
The American Heritage Dictionary uses the uncapitalized forms of "heaven" and "hell" as the entry words, but notes at the head of relevant entries "Often Hell" or "Often Heaven."
For secular publications, it is clear that the uncapitalized form is preferred. For religious publications, where hell is more likely to be reified in literal ways and wherein that concept is part and parcel of the rhetorical purpose of the text, capitalization of Hell and Heaven becomes more common and accepted, and perhaps even preferred.
@Peter Mortensen: I clearly did not look at the example when I responded. Obviously this is not a curse. Let’s boil it down to this: Not even the King James Bible capitalizes hell, except in isolated cases of emphasis or extreme reification. http://bit.ly/aXwJQh This link is to a Google Books search of the text. I should incorporate this in the main answer. At the end of the day, you can capitalize hell, for various reasons, but there are very few cases, if any, in which it must be capitalized in terms of formal discourse.
Working too fast again, on second look I actually don’t even see any capitalizations for emphasis or reification. The instance that caught my eye was in the case where two horses had names and one of the names of the horses was Hell. So, obviously, in that case, there is no ambiguity. All other instances of capitalization appear to be restricted to hell as the first word in a sentence.