“All that said, veneration should not look like worship. Do you agree with that?”
No, for what I assume your premise is is flawed. Two things can look alike and be dramatically different when we know what worship is, what prayer is.
“That leaves us with having to agree on what worship looks like, but we I see no way an honest person can perform certain acts and call them worship, and then perform those same acts and call them veneration. That would strike me as a tap dance.”
So you’ve created a false premise, populated it with a logical development based on that false premise and then come to a false conclusion and say others are tap dancing.
It seems to me that Protestant anti-Catholics have not the faith of children but the minds of children - I mean childish minds. To reduce all worship to what it “looks like” to the eyes of someone already anti-Catholic is laughable. I know of former Protestants, some once very anti-Catholic, and some people who are still Protestant who used to be horrified by the Rosary, statues of Mary, paintings of the Last Supper, crucifixes with a corpus, and so on. They aren’t like that anymore because they actually read about it, thought about it, prayed about it and realized none of the Catholics they know were actually worshiping any of those things. Sometimes I have been stunned at the stupid bigotry commonly accepted by Protestants I know when they say things like, “Well, I know Joe [a Catholic who is kind and generous to them] loves the Lord, but other Catholics are just idol worshipers.” When I respond with, “But Joe does the same things and believes in the same things as those Catholics you call ‘idol worshipers’,” I get comments like, “Well, I know Joe loves Jesus in his heart.” And that idiot can say those other Catholics don’t?
Yesterday, I talked to a mostly Catholic group in a town nearby. The members of the group who were Protestant also prayed a Hail Mary with the Catholics after I talked to them for a while. Those people are open to the truth unlike the Protestant anti-Catholics on FR.
So, then you are saying here that there is a difference between worship/prayer and veneration, and that Catholics know what it is.
You don't accept appearance as being what's different. You do suggest above that there is a difference.
What IS different in your mind?