My family plays a regular Dungeons & Dragons game, which I’ve referenced before in A Knight’s Tale. For those who have never played, D&D is essentially a shared story constrained by rules, terrific fun for people who enjoy storytelling. In our game, we kept running into cultists devoted to Orcus, a demon king.
Eventually, it became clear that something more ambitious was going on. These cultists were not merely serving a powerful demon. They were advancing his attempt to become something more. Alongside Orcus the demon existed Orcus the Roman god, a judge of the dead associated with oaths, punishment, and the underworld. By infiltrating temples meant for the god, the demon’s followers were siphoning reverence and authority toward their master, attempting to elevate him into godhood.
Rather than responding with force, my character tried something different. She renamed both of them.
The demon became “Poopyhead Orcus.” The Roman god became “the Bearded Judge Orcus.” We leaned into the distinction deliberately. As the names spread, the world responded. Statues changed, sprouting interestingly humiliating headgear matching the new name for the demon while the Roman god's beard just became thicker and more luxurious. The cult lost cohesion. Other gods were openly amused. The demon, we were warned, was furious.
Within the logic of the game, this worked. What surprised me was not that it worked in a fictional world, but how closely it mirrored the real one.
What Renaming Actually Does
Renaming is not cosmetic. It reallocates seriousness and authority and often meaning. Names act as compressed judgments. They signal what kind of thing something is and how it should be approached before any argument begins. This is why naming has always been treated as power rather than description, why Adam's first task in the Bible was naming all living things. It gave humanity power over the earth.
Renaming Orcus in our game did not change his abilities or ambitions. It changed the frame through which he was encountered. “Poopyhead Orcus” could still be dangerous, but he could no longer command gravity. Fear did not cohere. Devotion became awkward and began to feel silly. The cult weakened not because its beliefs were refuted, but because they were reframed.
Mockery does what argument cannot. Argument assumes seriousness. Mockery withdraws it. It is not a counterclaim but a demotion. Renaming alters the conditions under which content is taken seriously at all. Once the name shifts, the burden of proof shifts with it. Hierarchies that felt inevitable begin to look like performances.
The demon’s fury at being renamed, and in such a scatological way, made this clear. His bid for elevation depended on reverence, and reverence depends on language that reinforces it. Once that language fractured, so did the project.
Of course, this is all just a game, a storytelling game. But stories reflect life, and good stories often expose hidden truth. In this case, Orcus's fury at mockery reflected something that happens in real life: how people who do not really believe in God anymore experience mockery of their ideas. Ideas have become the false gods of modern times. And you can blaspheme ideas in this structure just as we once blasphemed against God.
Why Blasphemy Changed
Historically, blasphemy meant offense against God. It mattered immensely. God was understood to be real, sovereign, and morally authoritative. Blasphemy against God is not, however, harm done to God; it is harm done to the blasphemer. If God is transcendent, eternal, and not dependent on human belief, then mockery cannot weaken Him. What it does instead is train the speaker to treat what is ultimate as trivial, to misalign speech, perception, and moral judgment with the structure of reality itself. Over time, that posture erodes reverence, humility, and moral proportion, narrowing the soul’s capacity to receive truth or grace. The damage is inward, not outward. God is untouched; the person reshapes themselves in a way that makes reality harder to see and inhabit rightly.
Modern societies claim to have outgrown both God and blasphemy. We are told blasphemy no longer applies because God does not exist and nothing is sacred. That is not quite true. Blasphemy did not disappear. It moved. Humans, for some reason, must have things that are holy. And if you have things that are holy, you are likely to have blasphemy.
Today, the strongest taboos protect ideas. Certain concepts – identity, justice, progress, history, harm – are treated as morally ultimate. They are no longer arguments but premises. But ideas are not God; rather, they are brittle and easily destroyed, much like a soap bubble. Questioning them is treated as breach and mockery as attack because ideas are fragile. They are created and defined by human beings and are categorically not divine or eternal.
This shift did not occur because people became less moral, but because transcendence was removed while the need for moral certainty remained. The highest good was replaced.
Once an idea occupies that position, criticism becomes destabilization. Mockery becomes danger. Doubt becomes threat. And people forget about God, though of course He does not forget about them.
Why People Still Need Holiness
There must be a point at which argument stops; that is holiness. Without that, moral life collapses into endless negotiation and power. Holiness marks what is set apart as not merely important, but inviolable. Historically, God occupied that position. Transcendence solved a structural problem. If the highest authority exists outside the human system, no institution bears the full weight of moral finality. Disagreement does not automatically become existential conflict.
When God is removed, the need does not vanish. It relocates.
Modern societies often mistake rejecting God for rejecting holiness. In practice, explicit holiness disappears while implicit holiness reattaches itself to immanent, earthly things: ideas, identities, narratives, institutions. Justice, equality, peace, and dignity are real goods. But they are asked to bear a load they were never designed to carry. Ideas are made, revised, and enforced by people. They may be attached to God, and through Him gain more strength and resilience. But absent God, they are empty and hollow and fragile.
Holiness demands durability. It must absorb offense and mockery without collapsing. Transcendent holiness can do that. Immanent holiness cannot. Ideas need protection to avoid collapse. God does not. And just a side note: if you are terrified of mockery or questioning of your god, he just might be an idea to you rather than an entity.
Why Some Interpret Mockery as Violence
Mockery does not land the same way on everyone. The difference is structural.
For those whose moral world is anchored in God, mockery has limited reach. It may offend, but it does not threaten the foundation. God is eternal and independent of belief. Serious ideas are attached to Him, not to consensus.
For those whose moral framework is not anchored in transcendence, the highest authorities must be immanent. Ideas do not merely guide moral reasoning. They are moral order. In that context, mockery feels like sabotage. If the idea collapses, there is nothing beneath it, no higher court or eternal reference point. The threat is existential rather than ephemeral.
This explains a persistent asymmetry. Those who locate authority in God tend to shrug off mockery. Those who locate authority in ideas experience mockery as harm. The difference is not sensitivity. It is load-bearing responsibility, and ideas simply cannot bear that kind of a load. The weaker the idea, the more fragile it is and the more it needs to combat attacks on it.
False Gods and Borrowed Transcendence
When transcendence is denied but holiness is still required, power borrows the posture of the sacred without its substance. False gods emerge as ideas elevated beyond their scope. They claim ultimacy while remaining contingent. They demand reverence while depending on enforcement. They punish blasphemy while insisting they are merely rational or inevitable.
The tell is anxiety.
A true god does not need to consolidate belief or police language. His authority is not threatened by laughter. But false gods must recruit, expand, and defend aggressively. Because their authority is borrowed, exposure is always a risk.
The Orcus episode made this visible because the demon was not a god. He was attempting to become one. His authority depended on stolen reverence and blurred distinctions. Once the distinction was named and seriousness withdrawn, the project collapsed into fury. The true god did not need to compete. The demon did.
False gods cannot tolerate laughter because laughter reveals contingency. It shows that what claims ultimacy is, in fact, dependent on belief, enforcement, and fear of dissent. Once that dependence is visible, authority drains away quickly.
This is why the fiercest language policing always accompanies claims of moral inevitability. If the outcome were truly secure, it would not require such vigilance. The louder the insistence that “this is settled,” the more precarious the settlement usually is.
Borrowed transcendence can command obedience for a time. It can even inspire genuine devotion. But it cannot endure the withdrawal of seriousness. And it cannot survive being named for what it is.
What D&D Accidentally Revealed
What stayed with me was not the cleverness of the tactic, but how little imagination it required to figure it out. I just did it, instinctively, and the other players fell in behind me. Nothing new was invented. We acted on a distinction human beings have understood implicitly for a very long time. A demon aspiring to godhood behaved exactly like any power that depends on reverence without deserving it. He panicked when mocked. He raged when named.
The true god did not need to respond at all.
That contrast appears wherever ideas are asked to do the work of eternity, wherever language is treated as dangerous because it might dissolve what is held together by agreement alone.
Sometimes play reveals what seriousness works very hard to conceal.
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