Desecration isn't even a thing, other than as a metaphor for seriously pissing off a bunch of believers.
Historically unwise.
Sure. But desecration is still not a thing.
Do you feel it is your prerogative to define what and how much things and places are valued by others?
No. But that doesn't mean I can't recognise hyperbole when I see it.
The idea that something is not just precious, but
sacred, implies the existence of gods who care about that thing (or, more plausibly, the existence of people who have no valid claim to that thing, but wish to impose their opinions anyway).
The objectors are invariably
not gods.
The very moment that a god tells me they're upset, I shall happily reconsider.
I'm not holding my breath.
I believe I gave counterpoint that refutes that belief. Sacred sites to me, in my capacity of acting as a god in a system where not just one but two forms of such exist, are not important to me at all.
In fact, I generally make it a point in some of my interactions to
defile such a site by toppling statues there.
I suppose this goes into "mysterious to some, obvious to others" ways. People might attribute some holiness or blessed nature to a site, but the motivations and importance that get assigned to those places by denizens are correct.
Sure, relatively speaking, I might care a little bit... But the site isn't really special. It's just a site that I happened to point an interface at for the sake of simplifying my interactions from "set bit 6 of word f+8" to "select 'build Wall' from 'structure menu'". If the site falls, either I make a new one or try again there. It doesn't make me any less powerful, it just lets me be lazier.
Invariably even with such a site, my objection comes not in the form of any kind of visible divine action, but rather that my decisions, given the power that site gives me over the causality, lead to a very angry army of well armed dwarves turning the goblin invaders on the site to so many blood smears, scattered teeth, and traumatized children carrying dismembered body parts to dump them into a volcano.
There's nothing that exposes me there beyond the fact that decisions are inexplicably different and unique in this one place.
Of course, doing so takes the credit and meaningfulness of success away from the denizens of the world just so I can feel happy and successful. All in all its a rather monstrous sort of act to undertake, if one is not interacting with a universe of entities incapable of spontaneously coming to understand ethics.
In any world where consent is a well-understood concept capable of being actively understood by intelligent entities, this sort of action is still possible, but wildly unethical. I believe that this sort of failure in ethics was highlighted as a major plot point in John Dies at the End, in the depiction of Korrok.
