If you'd be so kind, could you clarify whether it is your (intellectual?) knowing or your emotional (feeling?) that is broader/more inclusive w.r.t. personhood? And am I correct to read this as saying you believe the former should trump the latter? Or is it just that the lack of agreement troubles you without your needing to "choose sides" between the two?
That's not what I hear moridinamael saying. We all make mistakes constantly, and rarely are even aware of them, so focusing on the mistakes of others as a basis for assessing them as inferior is one more mistake to add to our personal collections.
"they just also sucked ass at reasoning" -- did they claim to be trying to reason? There are plenty of forms of discussion other than reasoning, and it's also possible you are a fan of only one of multiple flavors of reasoning and dismiss the practice of other forms.
Your recollections of spending time with your inlaws brings up an interesting asymmetry: you only talk about you adjusting to fit with their ways of being. If, apart from any intellectual disparity between you and them, you view them to be social or humanistic equals, should you expect them to have an equal obligation to fit with you as you have to fit with them? Put another way, what does it imply about your view of them socially or humanistically that you (apparently) do not have this symmetrical expectation?
"many people kind of construct a self-serving moral system that overweights the virtues they themselves possess" -- or wish/believe themselves to possess.
"when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood" -- this seems like a great jumping off point for contemplating what "personhood" means, both in general and to you, specifically. In particular, if the partial derivative of someone's personhood with respect their intellectual seriousness is so large does that mean you're overweighting intellectual seriousness among all of the possible contributors to personhood? If so, is this because you genuinely value intellectual seriousness that much more than all those other factors, or is it just that you're paying more attention to it and, perhaps, not making the effort to recognize and/or suitably value the other factors when (implicitly) evaluating their personhood?
How does one who, like all of us, has only lived in one narrow slice of time assess that the time they are living in is different, particularly "much more X" for any given X, than other times? My knee-jerk old person reaction to this is that everyone wants to think their time, their circumstance is special, significant, important, dire, whatever. As at least one other person has pointed out, those of us who lived through the 60s-80s lived with the every day fear of nuclear war -- not something that might happen some day if a bunch of other uncertain things happened first, but something for which all necessary elements were already in place and a trial run had already been done in the form of the Cuban missile crisis.
Christians are an out group? Tell that to any non-Christian living in the American South.
Why would a rational person expend any effort to "defend" a belief? Shouldn't all such effort be spent exposing one's beliefs to potential refutation and weighing alternatives? Otoh, if we substitute the word "faith" for "belief" then we've got the answer to your question about rationality right there.
Yet, ironically(?), your emotions are telling you to rely more narrowly on your estimation of the person's intellect? I think that's what had me confused -- I was assuming you were saying your intellect wanted you to focus on intellect while your emotions were urging you to include emotions, among possibly other factors. One would hope that the emotional drive to use narrower criteria would be short-lived in comparison to your more deeply rooted (?) intellectual position.