"Without assurance, and since prayer and other deeds are part and parcel to your salvation/theosis, I would think you would be LESS likely to deviate your direct attention away from God and onto Mary and the Saints."
And yet for 2000+/- we have prayed to the saints and the Theotokos to intercede for us, as people have asked their friends to pray for them for at least as long(leaving aside the implications contained in a loaded term like deviate!). :)
The difference, and it is definitive, is that our friends are alive and benefit themselves from their prayers for us, whereas the various intermediaries and dead saints are all stone cold compost.
Deuteronomy 18:11, 1 Samuel 28:1-25, 1 Chronicles 10:13-14 and Isaiah 8:19 all speak against praying to the dead.
Repent of it.
For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; Who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this he did once, when he offered up himself." -- Hebrews 7:25-27"Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.