I've thought a lot throughout life about this too. It appears to have significance in the energy problem. Evil is something common to all religions. On religions, I don't believe those are just stories conjured up from nothing. There is a lot of supposedly circumstantial evidence indicating we are far from being the only ever intelligent species. Further, we appear to be related to others.
To me, as someone trained in formal Systems Engineering, we often use these techniques to gather together many seemingly unrelated things, to show that they are systemically related, and are thus evidence upon which we can confidently build human made systems. Those built systems functioning as intended then proves that our conclusions on the evidence were correct. Thus the evidence moves from circumstantial, to hard, proven.
I believe we are in process of doing this now with things of biblical significance, including the concept of good and evil.
It is only a matter of time until we work this out, and we are very close now.
By working it out, I mean someone puts forward a hypothesis, and the collective deduces it is the truth.
My own hypothesis of this, concluding (I hope!) nearly six years using formal systems Engineering methods to analyse the energy problem, is detailed in my story about "The missing sign".
In short, bad things come about by use of bad energy. All life requires energy to survive.
The inevitable conclusion of bad energy use, is the systematic destruction of all life on a planet, or any other body we might define as a host.
The only way we can get true sustainability, is to use the energy supplied to the planet at source, specifically from its local star, if it is lucky enough to have one.
In other words, solar power is the only one sustainable.
But we needed to evolve, to get to the technology needed to use solar directly.
Since religions were devised very early in our evolution, before we even developed conscious memory, they had to be devised such that they would be most likely to act as guidelines, no matter what stage our evolution.
Something we get better at, with evolution, is understanding abstract concepts. Again formal systems Engineering has techniques of dealing with those in a way we find them most useful to describe systemic concepts.
Religions, from this point of view, start to look like system specifications; blue-prints, from which systems can be deduced.
We start to see the possibility of blue-prints, corresponding more or less to races.
Thus we might see something like a jigsaw is appearing.
We know when a smaller piece fits, because we know roughly what the bigger picture should look like.
It fits that religions are blue-prints of a kind, doubling up as handbooks, for the created.
It fits that successful (sustainable) species / races use the energy of their local star rather than the energy of their host planet.
It fits that each species / race that has associated religion, was designed for a purpose.
Profit, is a mechanism and a concept which is entirely dependent on energy extracted from planets. Profit becomes irrelevant in terms of unlimited energy, such as emitted from stars.
So we should see energy from the planet requires competitive effort, whereas energy from stars requires collaborative effort.
We seem to have arrived at the point now, where we realise this.
Good and evil fits, by being beneficial or harmful things we might do,or aspire to doing, towards the overall goal of sustainability.
Killing our fellow humans, regardless of race, achieves nothing, actually frustrates the goal of sustainability.
All of the bad feeling and ill will generated by aggression, killing, and brutality frustrates the goal of sustainability, since what is needed to obtain the energy of stars, is collaboration.
So we might associate these two different modes of energy with two very different outcomes, one sustainable, and one unsustainable. We might notice this corresponds exactly with the mathematical sign of the energy we use, positive from the unlimited original source of the star, and negative, from the limited source that is the energy a planet might have stored from the star.
By stored I mean stored in the form of life, as well as by kinetic, and thermal stores of energy.
So any activity resulting in reduction of total energy stored (put to use) on a planet, is a negative activity, whilst activity adding to, or increasing the total energy put to use, is positive. Notice positive activity requires star energy, it can't be done using only the energy of the planet.
So, use of negative energy, which comes from below us, not the good energy from above, always has to end in net death or misery. We might notice this is true, if we consider that far more people died in misery than ever "Prospered", as a result of negative energy use, but we can easily forget or ignore those, as they don't complain, at least in any way we consciously sense.
That is to date.
But now we have the technology to use positive energy, and are starting to use it, everything is in process of changing.
As yet we can still only imagine a tiny fraction if the positive changes we will see in this new, mathematically positive mode.
Something that has to be done, to obtain the new mode, is the formal monetisation of positive Joules.
Currently, negative Joules are monetised. This is the basis of all economic activity, depending on the concepts of debt, interest, profit, capital, property (possesion), and so on.
All of that, with all of the associated death and misery of those sacrificed or enslaved was needed to extract the energy we needed to develop the technology needed to receive solar energy.
Whereas now what is needed is for us to learn how to receive, and to distribute fairly, because by that we will each maximise our personal benrfits, and those will be far greater than was ever possible on negative energy.
So we have to distribute money representing those Joules put to use on Earth from the sun, by us as a species, in order to realise its full benefits.
Now, this is all we are waiting for.
On whether or not this really is what was always meant as good and evil, by all races, notice the sign denoting mathematical positive.
Is it a coincidence this is a cross, which has positive significance in all religions?
By systems Engineering, absolutely not.