In mid-September, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell fined New England Patriots' coach Bill Belichick $500,000 and the Patriots another $250,000 for videotaping the signals used by the New York Jets' defensive coaches during the September 9 season. The Patriots will probably also forfeit their first-round draft choice in the April, 2008 NFL draft.

According to an NFL spokesman, the Patriots violated a rule "that no video recording devices of any kind are permitted to be in use in the coaches' booth, on the field, or in the locker room during the game." The spokesman pointed out that "clubs have specifically been reminded in the past that the videotaping of an opponent's offensive or defensive signals on the sidelines is prohibited."

Some commentators thought that the Patriots got off too lightly. They cited punishments meted out to players such as "Pac-Man" Jones of the Titans, who was suspended without pay for an entire season for his off-field behavior.

This criticism represented a minority opinion. The more common response was to do obeisance to the rightness of obeying the rules and then quickly downplay the significance of the Patriots' action. For example, Aaron Schatz of Football Prospectus said that the "strategic advantage" to be gained from breaking the rule was minor: The Patriots could only use any illicitly-obtained information for, at most, one-half of the game — a game that they won 38-14. Or, as Adam Schefter at NFL.com put it, "It's a whole lot easier to catch the spy than it is to actually beat him."

If that's supposed to make me feel better about what Belichick and the Patriots did, it's not working. In fact, the opposite is true: Judging the morality of an act by what the person gains from it reveals a profound ignorance about human nature.

In Book Two of his Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430) recalled the "past wickedness and the carnal corruptions of [his] soul." He described how "the mists of passion ... obscured and overcast" his heart and left him unable to "distinguish pure affection from unholy desire."

While what we normally associate with "unholy desire" — sexual sin — was among the offenses he recalled, the memory chagrined him the most involved, of all things, pears:

There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night — having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was — a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree.

Augustine wrote that he was "compelled to [robbery] by neither hunger nor poverty." What he stole he already possessed in "sufficient measure, and of much better quality." Instead, his actions were driven by a "a contempt for well-doing and a strong impulse to iniquity." He didn't "desire to enjoy what [he] stole, but only the theft and the sin itself." Augustine and his friends "laughed because our hearts were tickled at the thought of deceiving the owners, who had no idea of what we were doing and would have strenuously objected."

This wrongdoing, however trivial stealing pears may seem, was, for Augustine, the best evidence of his own depravity and left him wondering "who can unravel such a twisted and tangled knottiness?" as the human will and its motivations.

This may seem like much ado about pears (or stolen signals) but it's not (only) about pears — it's about our dispositions towards good and evil, right and wrong. It's about what Augustine called "concupiscence" and C.S. Lewis, in "Out of the Silent Planet" called being "bent." It's about why our actions often don't make sense, especially to ourselves.

We empathize with people like Jean Valjean from Les Miserables whose offenses — stealing bread in his case — are motivated by desperation. We can even understand (which is not the same thing as justify) offenses motivated by baser emotions such as hate and fear. But we also know that people commit evil acts for reasons that have nothing to do with desperation or hate — reasons that are often as opaque to them as they are to other people.

In "Pillar of Fire," the middle volume of his magisterial history of the Civil Rights movement, Taylor Branch tells the stories of two murders. The far more famous one involved the killing of three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — in Philadelphia, Mississippi by Klansmen. The other was the killing of a 13-year-old boy, Virgil Ware, riding on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle by a pair of kids outside of Birmingham, Alabama.

The stories told by the perpetrators were as different as the amount of attention paid to the respective murders. Michael Schwerner's killer told the FBI that he jammed a pistol into Schwerner's ribs and "from a face of animal hatred" asked him "are you that n****r lover?" to which Schwerner replied, "Sir, I know just how you feel." Those were his last words.

In contrast, the story told by the boys arrested for Ware's murder bares more than a passing resemblance to Augustine's story about the pears: An Eagle Scout, whose family "quietly sympathized" with the goals of the civil rights movement, got caught up in a turbulent moment and, for reasons he couldn't explain, wound up killing a 13-year-old boy who posed no threat to his physical safety and towards whom he felt no particular malice.

Whereas Schwerner's last words drew a bright line between the hate and fear that we all feel and the actions of his killers, the haphazard elements of Virgil Ware's murder reveals no such line: His murder was as senseless to Ware's killer as it was to Ware's family.

Senseless, that is, until we recall that the unregenerate human heart acts for reasons that have nothing to do with gain or loss. It's instructive to recall that the first recorded murder — Cain's slaying of his brother, Abel — was a wildly disproportionate response to the event that prompted Cain's action: God's preference of Abel's sacrifice over his own. Cain gained nothing from killing his brother.

In case you're wondering, I'm not comparing stealing signals (or pears) to taking a human life — I'm saying that if a person can point a gun at someone and pull the trigger without really understanding why you're doing it, another person can steal signals (or pears) for no good (or even bad) reason.

That's why those who tried to explain what happened at the Meadowlands in terms of what was to be gained from the violation were off the mark. Human nature, and its motivations, doesn't work that way. Sin not only alienates us from God and other people — it also alienates us from ourselves. Not only do we often want the wrong thing for the wrong reason, we don't even know why we do them. We become, as Augustine put it, "wastelands" to ourselves.

And the only way out of this wasteland is to move in the same direction Augustine followed to get out of his: towards the One of whom Augustine wrote, "He does not know [His creatures] because they are, but they are because He knows them."