When it comes to ethics, there are weeds among the wheat. Most people I talk to have a very definite opinion about the weeds at corporations such as Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Arthur Andersen, and the list keeps going on. Closer to home, the enemy planted "ghost employee" weeds in Oklahoma's State Health Department.

Ethics are the disciplines dealing with good and evil. They are our moral duties as individuals and groups of people.

How are ethics formed? To get a glimpse about the formation of my personal ethics, I reflected back on my life. Although it is too long ago to remember clearly, my parents must have planted the seed in me that it is wrong to steal because I always feel guilty when the idea of stealing even crossed my mind. I do remember my parents telling me to treat everyone equally, before I started my first job as a teenager at a bowling alley.

After college when I was working for Exxon, each year everyone got a letter from the president reminding us that in corporate dealings we were called to the highest ethics. And if a question ever arose, we were to go beyond the letter of the law. This was profound and continuing support of what I had learned from my parents much earlier.

Something has gone wrong with the top leaders of the organizations I mentioned. Ethics sometimes comes in second place in a competitive environment and I think this is due to a combination of greed and power. If a CEO of a big corporation is honest and retires, the CEO will receive an annual pension of about 3/4 million dollars. I could live on that! The temptation to "cook the books" can lead to multimillion-dollar bonuses over and above enormous salaries.

In society today there is often a relative morality rather than an absolute morality. In the relative case, anything goes as long as we don't get caught. It is especially evil when corporate officers operate with relative ethics because those who work closely with them have to do the same or loose their jobs. These corporate officers are the role models of success in our capitalistic society. These same officers who participate in creative accounting are temporarily very successful -- until they get caught.

Our personal ethics are affected by the unethical actions of others. Unethical people are not the salt of the earth and the light of the world as Jesus calls us to be. Jesus does not measure success by how powerful we are or how much money we make. Jesus says that he is "meek and humble of heart" and reveals things to the "little ones," not to those who are "the wise and learned."

We with absolute ethics are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We must act so that absolute ethics will predominate. We are called to change the world we live in for the better.

If my thoughts on how my ethics were formed can be used as a guideline, parents are the starting point and continuing support base for teaching their children the difference between good and evil. We who are relatives and neighbors of these children must also set an example for them. And if we are executives in a company, we can support our employees by requiring them to live up to a strong code of ethics.

As parents we must give our children enough education so that they can support themselves, but we must first teach them the way to eternal life before the way to financial success.

It appears that there will always be weeds among the wheat. However, Jesus tells us that these weeds will be burned at harvest time. Until then, we have the responsibility to nurture the wheat and to help it crowd out the weeds.