Impiety is a lack of respect for religion or for God — or one act that shows that lack. It is a serious, rather old-fashioned word. You meet it in stories about temples, kings, and holy law more often than at the dinner table. It can name the quality (a life of impiety) or a particular deed (an act of impiety). What counts as impiety depends on the community: in one place a joke in a temple feels like it; in another, only a hard attack on the faith does. Though actually, English also used piety more widely once, for duty to parents and country as well as to God, so older texts may treat impiety as a failure of that wider respect, not only of churchgoing. In modern everyday talk, people more often say disrespect, or “that was blasphemous,” which is sharper. Impiety is cooler and more formal: it names the gap where reverence should have been.

對神明不敬；不虔敬