I see what you’re saying. It’s really disagreement on how to go about with traditions, misrepresentations aside.
But lets not keep moving the goal posts here. Praying to Mary and transubstantiation does NOT equal polytheism, nor does it indicate a ‘polytheistic tendency’, no matter what they say. Maybe someone actually has done that in the ~2000 years of church history, I don’t know, but that is not what the church teaches. And even if the higher up did try to teach polytheism, of course that’d be a mistake...
In addition, not all of the traditions are requirements. You don’t have to say every single prayer ever written all the time to be Catholic. I hope it’s getting a bit clearer.
I wouldn't say that it does either, but I've known some protestants who be happy to get all righteously indignant about it. Since I don't believe in any of it, I don't have a stake either way.
But my original point was that there are thousands and thousands of religions each with many value systems within them. Therefore, I reject someone who claims to have used deductive reasoning to arrive at their own religious value system, since it's completely impossible to have known or studied every one; your geography, not your intricate look into the world's available faiths, usually (although not always) accounts for your beliefs.
In that sense, simply saying that there are three choices (polytheism, atheism, and monotheism) and its easy to eliminate two and arrive at one, doesn't cut it. Monotheism is not a value system.