Response to: Saints have no power but God's so they are not deities 
 
1 Corinthians 2:16 For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, THAT HE WILL INSTRUCT HIM? But we have the mind of Christ.

Thomas Aquinas referred to this line of scripture where God speaks through Jeremiah: “The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it? I am the Lord who search the heart, and prove the reins: who give to every one according to his way” (17:9-10). He said it proved that “angels do not know the secrets of human hearts.” The same must be true of the saints which raises the question that if nobody hears your secret prayers to saints or angels then who does? Satan? If you are saying prayers to angels and saints when they cannot hear you that puts you in the same category as those who the Bible says pray to statues that cannot see or hear them. It is idolatry.
 
True prayer is just awareness of God as pure love. The Church blocks this awareness by having people allocate time for prayer and use it praying to the saints. Why would you let yourself have this awareness? For God or for you or both? For God for Jesus said we must love him with all our hearts.
 
Protestants worship the saints in a sense - but they do not believe this involves invoking them. Catholics worship them as gods by talking to them as if they can hear and see and know them in detail like God does. For many, treating a saint as wise as God is idolatry and it is.
 
If the saints do not want to be treated like gods, Catholics are not honouring them at all. It is interesting that occultism is full of invocations of angels who are the same as saints to Catholics. Despite the Old Testament talking as if angels are God, not once does anybody pray to an angel in the Old Testament for help. The Catholic claim that the first Christians did not pray to anything other than God because there were no real saints yet to pray to is proven false. The angels were there.
 
The Church says the saints and angels are not divine and have no power of their own. The power is not theirs but God’s. But if you are divine, it does not matter where the power comes from as long as you have it. The saints receive it from God so it is their power then. You don't say that a top world leader has no leadership power of his own but it comes from the energy he gets from ecstasy tablets. He takes the power from the tablets and it is not the tablets that must get the credit. So the Church's doctrine that the saints have no power of their own is dishonest - it does not matter whose power they use, what matters is that it is now their power. Some who pray to Mary say that she has no power of her own. The power is God‘s and they say that because of that it is really him we pray to. The source of the power is actually irrelevant.
 
The beings condemned in the Bible as pagan gods claimed no power of their own. The gods had to do magic and get power from other gods. Also they limited one another’s power. Yet they were still gods.
 
The saints and angels are supposed to enjoy perfect freedom so they are far more gods and goddesses than the deities of the heathen ever were.
 
The Bible tells the story of Elijah and the Prophets of Baal. There was a contest to see if Elijah worshipped the real God or if the pagans did it. A sacrifice was done. Elijah was to call fire from Heaven down on the sacrifice as a test. The prophets of Baal called Baal to do this. They prayed and even cut themselves to get Baal's attention. They got no response. Elijah told them to pray harder in case Baal was out hunting or for some reason was unable to hear them. They virtually had to shout to make sure he could hear them. Nothing happened. But when Elijah prayed God responded by sending the fire down from Heaven. Elijah had the prophets slain. Baal is really like a saint for he is not all-powerful or all-knowing and seems to be almost human. He was more a saint than a God. The Christians struggle to make the story fit with the Bible teaching that it is a sin to ask God to perform miracles as in some kind of test. They reason that it is only right to test God if he permits it and agrees to be tested. But the Elijah story says nothing about that. A proper test would be if God's servants were able to reach heroic degrees of holiness that pagans could never hope to emulate. But what we have with Elijah is a selfish show of power. The story is not about the worship of a false God so much as about a protest against honouring a being that is nothing compared to God. It excludes the veneration of saints.
 
The notion that to ask the saints for help is really to ask God for they have no power of their own and there is only his power contradicts the fact that if that is true then it makes no sense to invoke the saints at all. It shows a desire for idolatry even if it is not idolatry.
 
Catholicism is seen by many as monotheistic in theory. But what about emotionally? The heathens felt they wanted to adore many gods and gave in to that. If you feel for Mary as for a goddess then you are an idolater even if you believe, "God is boss not her."

Catholicism teaches that only God matters and that it means to honour God when it honours its saints such as Padre Pio or the Virgin Mary. It says God has made them what they are so he gets the honour when you honour them. But if that were true, the Catholics would be forbidden to honour saints they know nothing or little about. You can't see God in the saint unless you know a lot about the saint. The saint cannot bring you to God except by helping to manifest God's grace in his own life. The Catholic saints are really just gods and the Church will fire priests who advocate the worship of the saints as Gods - and the Church shows its two-faced fundamentalism.

If there is nothing occult about Catholicism, why is its favourite angel the Archangel Michael?  Michael is often invoked during occult rites to bless water and magic circles.