Let's Give The Muslims A Day Off

[Pyrrho]

Nestor:

I see you have added content.  Given when and where Mill wrote, one could hardly expect him to completely denounce Christianity.  Mill also pretended that his Utilitarianism fit in with Christianity.  From Utilitarianism:

• We not uncommonly hear the doctrine of utility inveighed against as a godless doctrine. If it be necessary to say anything at all against so mere an assumption, we may say that the question depends upon what idea we have formed of the moral character of the Deity. If it be a true belief that God desires, above all things, the happiness of his creatures, and that this was his purpose in their creation, utility is not only not a godless doctrine, but more profoundly religious than any other. If it be meant that utilitarianism does not recognise the revealed will of God as the supreme law of morals, I answer, that a utilitarian who believes in the perfect goodness and wisdom of God, necessarily believes that whatever God has thought fit to reveal on the subject of morals, must fulfil the requirements of utility in a supreme degree. But others besides utilitarians have been of opinion that the Christian revelation was intended, and is fitted, to inform the hearts and minds of mankind with a spirit which should enable them to find for themselves what is right, and incline them to do it when found, rather than to tell them, except in a very general way, what it is; and that we need a doctrine of ethics, carefully followed out, to interpret to us the will God. Whether this opinion is correct or not, it is superfluous here to discuss; since whatever aid religion, either natural or revealed, can afford to ethical investigation, is as open to the utilitarian moralist as to any other. He can use it as the testimony of God to the usefulness or hurtfulness of any given course of action, by as good a right as others can use it for the indication of a transcendental law, having no connection with usefulness or with happiness.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

It is, ahem, a stretch to try to convert Christian ethics into utilitarianism, though we see that Mill wanted to get people believing such a story.  Of course, in his essays on religion (specifically, "Utility of Religion," which he withheld from publication for many years, apparently from a fear of how his ideas on religion might be taken), we find that Mill is not always interested in the truth of an idea, but in its utility instead, which he (rightly) states is a different question from its truth or falsity.  That he thought it useful for people to believe that utilitarianism fit with Christianity I have little doubt, though I have too much respect for his intelligence to believe that that he really regarded that as the truth.  It was useful and safe for him to not speak out against Christianity, and to pretend that his ideas fit it well.

Given the time and place in which he wrote, one should no more take his explicit pronouncements on religion seriously than one normally takes Hume's remarks on God seriously in his discussion "Of Miracles," in which Hume explains why it is unreasonable to believe religious miracles, all while saying that God is real and Christianity is true.  He wisely did not want to get into trouble with people around him, and so he made claims that are not true.