Thomas Sutcliffe: A group hug will not end religious intolerance

These are strange days indeed. I would have thought it vanishingly improbable that I would find myself in agreement with Iain Duncan Smith on any subject, but yesterday I felt a pulse of sympathy when it was reported that he had declined to sign a "Pledge to British Muslims". I've been consoling myself with the possibility that we're not in agreement at all – his explanation was curiously mealy-mouthed, so the motives for his reluctance remain unclear. The fact remains, though, that I would have hesitated to sign it too – so I couldn't help but feel a sort of kinship as he was excoriated from all sides by right-thinking folk.

Not that I'm in favour of intolerance or mosque-burning – I'd happily sign up to condemn both. It's more an anxiety about the way that tolerance is increasingly being defined as a kind of universal group hug, an untenable promise never to say anything offensive. Coercive ceremonies of togetherness like that organised by Islam Awareness Week push us still closer to the notion that it is an inalienable human right not to have your feelings hurt – that tolerance means the agonised avoidance of all offence. And as someone who thinks the bedrock of a tolerant society is the acceptance that offence should sometimes have to be endured – I find that redefinition troubling.

I'm not sure what such a pledge is worth, to begin with, unless it is equally binding on all parties – yet there are obvious ways in which some signatories would instantly find themselves in breach of it. The pledge, for example, commits people to avoiding "inflammatory or discriminatory" language. So what do you do about the invective found in many religious texts?

Take the following remarks: "Muslims shall burn for ever in the fires of hell. They are the vilest of creatures." This would, surely, be construed as arousing intolerance and religious hatred by even the most demanding judge. But the origin of this sentence is a text that would, presumably, be beyond the reach of any law, since – barring one polemical adjustment on my part – it comes from the Koran itself, from a passage called "The Proof". The original, naturally, reserves its invective for "unbelievers among the People of the Book and the pagans".

Now it's possible that the translation is faulty here. NJ Dawood's translation of the Koran has been criticised by some Muslims for depicting the faith as more bloodthirsty than it actually is. But, unless these phrases are a willed slander on the part of the translator, it's difficult to believe that the sentiments are very different in the original Arabic. This isn't a matter of nuance, after all. "Burn" isn't intended as a metaphor for post-mortem embarrassment at the discovery that there is a God after all, and you've blown your chance to stay on his right side.

And these words aren't trivial or without consequence. To imagine the prospective torture of those you disagree with is to take one large step towards carrying out that punishment in this world. The verdict and sentence are already in, after all. All that's at stake is when the punishment is actually carried out... and perhaps God won't be too displeased if some of his more distasteful chores are done for him.

Countless religious zealots, not just Osama bin Laden, have taken that step in the past. So to feel offence at such phrases – to see them as "inflammatory" in the most literal way – falls into a different category than taking offence at a fictional depiction of the prophet (to give one salient recent example).

All the same, I would not want a law that prohibited a Muslim from describing me – or secular Muslims – as "vile" fuel for hell's bonfire. In a free society it would be unenforceable, and I don't want to live in the society that could make it stick. Devout Muslims can call me what they want – they will find that I don't actually want to exploit the liberty to insult them in return. All I want the law to do is to protect me against those who decide to pre-empt God's punishment, and for it to treat us both – non-believer and believer alike – as interchangeable.

Because there are two different ways in which a society can protect liberty of conscience. It can show itself panoptically concerned about the myriad individual hurts we might feel or, more practically, can present itself as universally indifferent to them. Right now, unfortunately, the government doesn't; the blasphemy laws do not include Islam, and that is an obvious inequity. But the solution is not to enlarge the scope of that law (an ugly bit of legislative scar tissue originally enacted to bolster intolerance rather than diminish it) but to do away with it altogether.

If Christian leaders really wish to prove their tolerance – to all British citizens – they would surrender their indefensible privilege and take a forceful stand against the proposed laws on religious hatred. The word "tolerance" originally meant the ability to bear hardship and pain. It carries in its very etymology the deeply civilised notion of putting up with ideas you don't like. If we want to protect it, we shouldn't lose sight of that in a blur of good intentions.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk