It’s a statement just five words long. I found myself rebuked by it again the other day. I could sense it in the social ether; that same old whine marching with ill-deserved satisfaction in the direction of my conversation: ‘I find that so offensive’. Offence taken, my mortified victim proceeded to fold their arms and narrow their eyes – the very anatomy of an expectant apology. But I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t even understand the complaint.

If those five words even constituted an argument, which they don’t; or were somehow worthy of my submission, which they aren’t; then I suppose my reply, which was ‘so what?’; would not have met with sound of plummeting jaws and breathy indignation. These five words have the power to alter the usually sane into the momentarily mad. Modern life has become a disgruntled blizzard of arm-folding, finger-wagging and tip-toeing, and the ensuing brouhaha whenever this cultural crime is committed never provokes ‘national debate’; it whittles away gleefully at our personal liberties.

We are repeatedly told that criticising the beliefs of the devout and determined is insensitive and unjust. Yet is it not sensible that whatever one believed to be ‘right’, it should necessarily be exposed to the claims of the ‘wrong’, because only in an open and critical fight could the ‘right’ be truly vindicated? No, apparently. Even the application of this painfully obvious position is enough to offend some.

The religious, for example, make a virtue out of ‘faith’: a belief in something apparently evidential without any apparent evidence. If I were to state that the faithful simply assume what they have yet to prove – say, the divinity of Jesus or the credibility of the Koran – am I querying and criticising, or offending? Personally, I hope to achieve all three; the author Philip Pullman recently went one better. Even before the publication of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, he received letters telling him that as punishment for his offensive novel (yes, novel) he would spend eternity in hell. Mr. Pullman will be relieved to hear that no such place exists.

Though he may be less relieved by this increasingly typical trend for melodrama over words. After all a book is easily ignored, and blasphemy, you may have noticed, is a victimless crime. Perhaps we get so frustrated about words because we actually feel quite contended. Most of the time the only thing we have to worry about is words. When your survival is a certainty, when you're warm, and sheltered, and free of disease, what else is there to worry about and endlessly obsess over other than your ‘feelings’? No one can stop you doing this of course, but if you wouldn’t mind doing it on your own time. I might remind everyone that the world’s smallest, saddest violin is not a public instrument.

But wait: I can tell what you’re thinking. What right have I to degrade these feelings? Your question is a very old and very justified question. But the right and warrant to criticise or offend is an unavoidable accessory of free expression, and the only way to find the uncrossable line is to cross it. So, to the question, who do you think you are? My chilled response is quite simply: who wants to know?

This, of course, does not mean that my feelings are never hurt. I found the Pope’s recent, tepid apology for the decades of child abuse in Irish Catholic orphanages deeply offensive – Herr Ratzinger excused the actions of his Cardinals, only, in the next breath, to reaffirm the infallibility of his doctrines. Church leaders were then exposed for having harboured paedophiles and having protected them from justice: how could I not be offended? Dear me, this is the sort of crime that would make an atheist think he was hell-bound.

So these hurt feelings can be justified – but what I cannot justify is my right to act upon these emotions in a malicious or even violent manner. Indeed, no one can ever justify such actions. Murder on the streets and the violation of a nation’s diplomatic immunity is not real redress for the publication of a cartoon. But if you do believe that, say, Salman Rushdie’s literary efforts were offensive, and that those who sought violent reprisal were perhaps justified, then you must realise that you make simultaneous and indistinguishable the opinion of the world’s Muslim community with the utterances and demands of the most berserk, senile Iranian theocrats. Now, that is offensive!

So I leave you, then, with my favourite tale of offence (maybe one day you too can regale and affront your acquaintances with it). It concerns the opening night of the 1955 Broadway production of the Diary of Anne Frank. In the second act, as the German soldiers came pounding on the door and stomping into the front parlour, someone in the front shouted: ‘She’s in the attic!’ I look forward to your indignant letters.