***Nobody in his right mind should think that he is going to curry favor with God by picking on His mom.***
This sentence makes a Protestant feel like wretching. Your whole exposition sounds like a pep talk given to the executioners of the Inquisition before they were told to "Now get out there and root out these evil blaspheming heritical Protestants!"
People get healed out of their faith in God... or even just their faith in faith ... or by the placebo effect. Or they had a psycosomatic illness to begin with and it was displaced by their religious experience. More often than not there was no healing at all.
When I see RCs all over the earth running after false signs, silly shapes in windows or pieces of bread or sap running out of a wooden idols eyes it makes me sick. The word 'savage' or 'heathen' comes to mind.
Throughout Mexico and South America in many churches they have a life-sized bloody Christ lying in a crystal coffin and the genuflecting peasant women are just as likely to go see the local witchdocter for a cure when they are sick.
Protestant churches popping up by the thousands all over Latin-America teach the true power of Christ and the people are forsaking their witchdoctors.
When Catholics are taught to seek Mary they are diverted from true religion which is faith in Christ alone. We do not denigrate Mary. Only the diefication of her. You will say you do not diefy her but you do. It is plain and clear.
"People get healed out of their faith in God... or even just their faith in faith ... or by the placebo effect. Or they had a psycosomatic illness to begin with and it was displaced by their religious experience. More often than not there was no healing at all. "
The trouble with this theory is that there is a panel of physicians that scientifically documents what goes on at Lourdes, and studies it. I didn't know that the congenitally blind could have their optic nerves grow back from the placebo effect. It happened at Lourdes. This is not medieval stuff. It is 20th Century documented medical fact. One of the reasons the International Scientific Committee is there is specifically to bring whatever happens at Lourdes under the microscope of science.
Anyway, let's assume that these folks were healed by faith in faith, as you put it. Great! But what's the CONTENT of that faith? Why, the veneration of Mary, at a shrine to Mary.
Now, no faith healing could ever occur if God did not allow it, could it?
Well, COULD IT?
So, all of these thousands of faith healings are medically documented to occur in a place devoted to something that you insist offends God.
Funny that God lets it happen there, specifically, and not elsewhere like that.
You could go and start reading the medical reports from the 70 or so documented miracles at Lourdes. They are available on line. You can read the whole thing. And then you can ponder: God, why do You let that happen THERE, with people who believe those things which offend You?
And at some point you will come to the realization that all of the wretching and objection and offense is on YOUR part. God obviously favors the Shrine to His mother at Lourdes, hence the avalanche of faith healings. YOU think that God has no right to favor a Catholic Shrine to Mary.
But He evidently disagrees with you.
The lesson to be learned is that you should bend your still neck and accept that the adoration of Mary such as Catholics practice it is manifestly pleasing to God, because God does not heal people by the thousands so openly and consistently any place else on Earth.
Where is the Protestant Lourdes?
Where?
Martin Luther did not have a problem with Mary.
Why do you?