Is there a specific culture or tradition where the above paragraph makes sense? It doesn't work mathematically. I'm trying to figure out how to interpret your remarks.
The simple stuff
Mathematically these two are the same, the difference being 1.
The less simple stuff
The idea of zero being "nothing" goes far beyond numbers. Culturally, religiously philosophically and martially, the ideas of approaching infinity (maximum centrifugal) and the approaching the void (maximum centripetal) may very well be argued as what drives the forces within the universe. Maybe even so far as what created the universe. There is a concept in macrobiotics where something becomes so yin (or yang), known as "super-yin" (or "super-yang") that it turns in on itself and becomes the opposite yin becomes yang, yang becomes yin. In terms of direction infinity becomes the void, or visa-versa. This is where extending out to infinity at the speed of light will allow one to be anywhere in space/time, including nowhere and never.
Here are some relevant quotes from Wikipedia:
Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, "How can nothing be something?", leading to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum. The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea depend in large part on the uncertain interpretation of zero.
The importance of the creation of the zero mark can never be exaggerated. This giving to airy nothing, not merely a local habitation and a name, a picture, a symbol, but helpful power, is the characteristic of the Hindu race from whence it sprang. It is like coining the Nirvana into dynamos. No single mathematical creation has been more potent for the general on-go of intelligence and power. G.B. Halsted
Dividing by zero...allows you to prove, mathematically, anything in the universe. You can prove that 1+1=42, and from there you can prove that J. Edgar Hoover is a space alien, that William Shakespeare came from Uzbekistan, or even that the sky is polka-dotted. (See appendix A for a proof that Winston Churchill was a carrot.) Charles Seife, from: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
...a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it lent to all computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions. Pierre-Simon Laplace
The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilized of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought. Alfred North Whitehead
...a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit--almost an amphibian between being and non-being. Gottfried Leibniz
Perhaps you had some specific ideas that you wanted to postulate to refute the ones I mentioned, or specific questions that you would like me to try and better address in a PM.