All that you and Mr Rogers say is true, but the solution is not for thoughtful people capable of rational discussion to retire from the forum. When good posters leave, trolls fill the vacuum.
The solution is to present a clear exposition of our belief systems, and in doing so take the toxic threads away from the trolls.
I am as indignant as anyone when someone from another confession pretends to know that a Catholic praying to Mary is having idolatrous thoughts. But getting into a back and forth with a mindless propagandist is not resolving the issue. Explaining why prayers to Mary are worded and structured as they are is a teachable moment. It also is an opportunity to offer these same prayers publicly. If we explain the Catholic theology and praxis calmly, we will not silence the trolls but we will make their work serve a useful purpose.
I know you are right.
But then your expressed belief system is that every Catholic only asks Mary for intercession...However, that has been proven time and again not to be accurate...
Some Catholics pray to Mary directly for salvation, grace, peace and any number of things that are only available from God...
I am as indignant as anyone when someone from another confession pretends to know that a Catholic praying to Mary is having idolatrous thoughts.
The problem here is who gets to define what idolatrous thoughts and worship are...You guys say it is your 'church' that gets to define...
Apparently there was a lot of confusion in your religion and different names had to be adapted to separate what even you had trouble with...Dulia, Hyper Dulia, SuperDuper Dulia, etc...For us on the outside, it's pretty simple...We worship God...We don't venerate, anyone...
And then we find that God did a pretty good job of defining what worship is in the scriptures...Want an idol, statue, figurine of some being in heaven??? Don't make one...Got an idol, statue, figurine of someone in heaven??? Don't bow down to it...In fact, destroy all of them...Pretty simple...
So regardless of whether you guys think or don't think you are worshiping Mary, or a statue of her, to us on the outside it looks evil...To us it is a sin...And what does God say about evil???
1Th 5:22 Abstain from all appearance of evil.
What it comes down to is that you guys have been conditioned to believe that whatever it is you are doing with Mary and your Saints is not worship and it is not sin...God says otherwise...
And we can be similarly as indignant
and just as justifiably so
WHEN
Vatican Affiliiates et al
dogmatically INSIST in their most !!!!DEMANDING!!!! and !!!!CONTROLLING!!!! style that
Trinitarian Protty Christians
HATE them personally or even that we hate the whole of the Insitution merely because we hate various spiritually deadly heresies, from our perspective.
However, the lack of insight and fair-minded capacity to see that what's good for the goose is good for the gander seems to be wholesale lacking between the ears of every last person of the 1-3 dozen in the more rabid Vatican Affiliated cliques hereon.
That's most underwhelming; unimpressive; cheeky; duplicitous; hypocritical to the max etc. YET WE ARE SUPPOSED TO RESPECT such a double standard and mentality???
Not remotely likely.
BTW, I don't believe that every last Vatican Affiliate worships Mary. I've known plenty who do not. And I do not know emphatically 100% that any given individual does--even amongst the rabid cliques so given to SOUNDING LIKE they do 24/7.
However, we can note that certain phrasings, compulsive defensiveness; fixations etc. SURE SEEM TO INDICATE SUCH because, as Scripture asserts, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
Also, I recall the research I did on Vatican affiliated church names in the greater Los Angeles area--should be a clue to the relative priorities given Mary vs Jesus. Mary triumped over Jesus by quite a margin. 10's of percentage points, IIRC. Then we had a raft of rationalizations about that. Very illogical and unimpressive, to the Protty perspective on reality.