Choose Love Over Hate

I noticed something interesting as I read Alma 35 today. After Alma and the other missionaries left the Zoramites, all of those who believed were expelled from the land and they went over to join the people of Jershon. The people of Jershon were former Lamanites who had embraced the gospel and abandoned their homes and joined themselves with the Nephites. The fact that the people of Jershon accepted those who had been expelled so infuriated the remainder of the Zoramites that they joined up with the Lamanites. The thing I found interesting was that both the believers and non-believers among the Zoramites joined up with a group of Lamanites. We can see that those who embraced peace and love and mutual respect joined up with a group of Lamanites who embodied those values. And those who embraced hatred and warfare and destruction joined up with a group of Lamanites who had given themselves over to wrath and ruin. And one of the great ironies is that the people of Jershon had taken an oath of nonviolence and the armies of mingled Lamanites and Zoramites would also be forced to take an oath of nonviolence after they had been defeated in battle and many, many of them had been slain. So both groups of Zoramites joined with Lamanites and would take an oath of nonviolence, but those who embraced hatred suffered so much death and destruction from their choice. We live in a time of increasingly polarized groups and tribes and causes. If you were to strip them down to their most basic, you would probably find that many of them use the same sorts of tactics and approaches. Groups on the far right and the far left accuse each other of fake news, and gate keeping, and canceling. They may argue over which news sources are fake and which people deserve to be canceled, but they're both doing very similar things. I'm not going to argue that one political party or social identity or interest group is more righteous than all the others, but an awful lot of them will speak of tolerance and in the same breath glory in being intolerant to those who have been judged as being intolerant. The people of Jershon took in the outcasts of the Zoramites and would not be bullied by those who chose hatred over kindness. The Zoramites who joined with the people of Jershon entered into a community that was dedicated to building each other up and embracing one another's differences and loving and respecting each other in an upward cycle of growth and development. The Zoramites who joined with the Lamanites entered into a community that devoted its entire focus to the hatred and destruction of their enemies, such that everyone was consumed by a downward spiral into death and destruction. It is our choice to align ourselves with communities that build us up, or with communities that just want to watch the world burn.