We will have to agree to disagree, I'm afraid. I don't care what spin ya put on it, they threw children into fires and murdered people to please their gods. That's psycho. That's evil. Today, if some guy was to kill his children to appease his deity, or someone else's children, cutting them into pieces or throwing them into fires or both, there wouldn't be a whole lot of people who would argue. They'd all agree, that guy was nuts and downright evil.
Here. I'll even pick on Christians since I am one. Inquisition. Evil. Downright sick, twisted, misguided, totally against the true tenets of the faith, and it was flat out evil. They put a righteous spin on it, but that did not in any way make it right.
We are actually agreeing about modern times. Today if that happened, it would be considered evil because we know not that stuff is not necessary. Considering our ancestors evil would be like humans several hundred years in the future when disease is eradicated and immortality is normal (yeah right, but let's pretend for a moment humans aren't destroying everything) calling us evil for letting people suffer and die. We don't know any better.
They weren't evil; they were misunderstood.
Well I would hope future humans would call us misunderstood rather than evil for not knowing how to get rid of disease and death. :P