@Mr.Bultitude Depends on what you mean by "inherently". Tolkien did say "Nothing is evil in the beginning" - he did feel in his late 70s that his depiction of Orcs wasn't compatible with this and tried a lot of approaches to rework it; unsuccessfully.

I'd say the approach in Catholicism generally is: There's no such thing as an "inherently bad person". All humans, like all of God's creations, are inherently good; but anyone with free will can ipso facto abuse their freedom of choice to go against God's will, even to the point at which such choices appear to be the only ones they can make.

@MattGutting how do they reconcile that with Romans which says basically "no one is good" ?

@waxeagle Not sure offhand, though one of the first texts that comes to my mind is "God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good."

@waxeagle I'm sure there's a comment in my Bible, but do you have a specific Romans verse I could look up?

@MattGutting Romans 3:10 is the one that immediately comes to mind

@waxeagle My personal response to that is to say that we are all sinners, certainly; and we are so because we are affected by the burden of original sin. HOWEVER...

Human beings as we are created are inherently good, like all of God's creation, and by the sacrifice of the Cross, Jesus has taken away what you might call the slavery to original sin, and allowed us to be ...

treated as if we were human beings as we were originally meant to be - justified before God.

This is my personal response and understanding; I believe that it is consonant with the Church's official stand.

This guy needs some direction.

@fredsbend He's gotten direction before and seems to have ignored it consistently. If he reaches out on Meta I'll be glad to offer some input, but he's already been given lots of input in comments on his questions.

@fredsbend "southwest by south"?

@MattGutting Thank you for your thoughts.

@Mr.Bultitude Yeah ...