The Problem of Inherent Evil

In response to my pointing out how God sure seems to be the opposite of just, I was given some further clarifying comments:

The Christian belief is that people are not inherently good, but inherently selfish and our just penalty is eternal separation from a God who is holy and good. Jesus Christ lived a perfect life and willingly died so that God's justice could be satisfied. No person can live a perfect life so God gives you the option of accepting Jesus Christ's death as your penalty.

Wow, maybe ten words before needing to stop for a fundamental problem: saying people are inherently bad clashes with both free will and moral judgment!

The idea of free will is incompatible with the idea that we are inherently good or inherently bad -- having free will means you can choose to do either good or bad. So you can't have both free will and inherent badness. Assuming you (wisely) keep free will, the fact that people can and do choose is the entire point of moral judgment: we need to evaluate peoples' choices and actions as good or bad to understand their value significance in our lives and treat them accordingly (for one, it is really good for us to avoid sociopaths and instead hang with virtuous people who can offer us value instead of the opposite). Give up free will and you won't have any choices to judge morally -- punishing someone for putting a baby in a plastic shredder would be like punishing them for having blue eyes. And even somehow setting aside its incompatibility with free will, inherent badness would mean moral judgment divorced from our choices and actions. Uh, what's moral judgment again? Talk about a contradiction to write home about, that's up there with "married bachelor"!