I know that the pin which is
acting as input should be set to '1'.

So far so Good.

And also know that when you do the above, (write "1" to the port latch), it effectively turns off the transistor connected to the pin and the pin status is just read by a tristate buffer inside the MCU. So whether you read a 1 or a 0, no damage will happen as described by you. Save the resistors for some other use!

Raghu