Praying for the departed in heaven?
“For I am not a God of the dead, but of the living”.
They aren’t dead and we can ask them to pray for us just as we can anyone else. It’s no different.
As for:
“perpetual virginity of Mary”.
Show me evidence that Christ had blood brothers and I will be happy to concede the point. Scripture is silent on many things.
Scripture doesn’t go on at length about what Christ was like as a baby, or his childhood. Does this mean that he was never a child? Nor does it refer to Mary’s purported other pregnancies.
However it does say that Mary will be considered blessed, and it does say that those who choose not to have children will also be considered blessed.
The early Church did not teach what the Church teaches today concerning Mary. In fact they denounced it as heretical.
It originated in the fifth century with the heretics Pelagius and Celestius and was universally rejected by both Fathers and popes of the early church, as evidenced by its rejection by Augustine and Gregory the Great, and in later centuries by Anselm, Bernard of Clairveaux, and Thomas Aquinas. The Roman Catholic patristic scholar, Walter Burghardt, confirms the patristic and papal rejection of this doctrine historically:
Post-Augustinian patristic thought on the perfection of Mary reveals two conflicting currents. There is a negative, unfavorable trend rooted in Augustine's anti-Pelagianism; it accentuates the universality of original sin and articulates the connection between inherited sin and any conception consequent upon sinful concupiscence. The root idea is summed up by Leo the Great: 'Alone therefore among the sons of men the Lord Jesus was born innocent, because alone conceived without pollution of carnal concupiscence.' The same concept is discoverable in St. Fulgentius, Bishop of Ruspe in Africa (d. 533), the most significant theologian of his time; in Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) at the end of the sixth century; and a century later in Venerable Bede, a scholar renowned throughout England.
In later centuries the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was a matter of violent dispute within the church between Franciscans and Dominicans for centuries. It also contradicts the scriptural teaching of the universality of original, as well as actual, sin.
Roman Catholicism teaches the faithful that Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven. It states that this too is a dogma of the faith, a truth divinely revealed by God and necessary to be believed for salvation. It goes so far as to assert that any who would dispute this doctrine have completely fallen from the faith and are condemned. For the first six centuries nothing is said on this matter.
The first Father to promote the teaching of her assumption was Gregory of Tours in A.D. 590, and he based his teaching on an apocryphal gospel found in the Transitus literature. The assumption doctrine actually originated with this literature sometime in the fourth or fifth centuries and this specific teaching — the Transitus assumption of Mary was officially rejected as heretical. It was placed in the same category with such heretics as Arius, Pelagius, and Marcion and was condemned by two popes in the late fifth and early sixth centuries — Gelasius and Hormisdas. These popes place this doctrine, its authors and the contents of their writings, as well as all who follow their teachings, under an eternal anathema. Thus, the early church viewed this doctrine not as the pious expression of the faith of the faithful but as a heretical doctrine that probably originated from gnostic sources. Discoveries such as these only underlined my growing awareness that Rome did not accurately represent the historic doctrine of the early church, much less what I saw in the New Testament.
Rome teaches that Mary is a mediatrix and even a co-redemptrix with Christ and that grace cannot be applied to man except through her. This teaching is also false. It not only contradicts the scriptural teaching of the unique and exclusive mediatorial role of Christ but there is not one word found in Scripture of Mary functioning in the role of mediatrix or co-redemptrix. Nor is there one word of this kind of teaching in the writings of the Fathers.
The early Church would have condemned todays Church as heretics.
It looks like you are having to carry this thread debate on your own for your side, so I am asking this not to pick on you but to ask for a clarification. You say Scripture says that those who choose to not have children will also be considered blessed. Just where exactly does it say this?