Sure enough.
Profits are the result of getting more income than what is paid out. So if one can keep the cost very low, the profit increases very much.
On the other hand, the approach increases poverty to the extent it becomes a "social" issue. Entire systems of exchange will fail if some level of poverty is not supported to some degree.
The different ends of the spectrum are connected by means of who is employed or not.
Therefore, who can work or not in any system becomes the smallest explicable value.

I read the discussion closely. My opinion is based upon a considered response to the views offered. I included a post that explained my point of view. Argue against that, if it is of interest to you.
Or not. Whatever.

I thought it was you that was intent upon setting the terms of the discussion.

One way to look at it is the emphasis upon diagnosis. One has to define it to support treatment. That approach makes sense from many points of view. It is difficult to imagine another way to provide help as an institution.
On the other hand, the institutions get it wrong many times. Or only partially right; for any variety of reasons.
The entire industry of mental health is....

Arguments based upon authority are the weakest kind.

I was responding to your comment that observing differences in equality was about an agenda to level all experiences. Like a nuclear war or what not.

You aren't doing a great job of owning your own ideas. My interest level is dropping.

Which part do you not understand?

If your main concern is equality, the best way to do what would be to crash the stock market. Everyone would suffer, but we'd all be more equal. If a nuclear war broke out we'd all be much more equal. — BitconnectCarlos

The problem with inequality is not that it fails to provide equality. When the means of exchange in a system are vastly different from each other, it involves using the inequality as a fulcrum of wealth.

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. — Marx

I have been interested in that statement since I first read it. It is an observation brought forward to argue about other arguments. The passage could be cited as an example of where Marx did not hold his own views up to this lens. I don't want to kick his ass or save it so that part bores me.

Being a witness to a process is interesting. Marx's desire to have a quality accepted as fundamentally obvious killed it at the same time.

While comparing different nations' means of financing government, a number of factors have to be kept in mind.

The first question to ask is where the wealth is coming from. Diverse economies are very different systems compared to limited industry types. You mention Switzerland as a "tax haven." That is a reference to their banking industry that largely deals with money from other places. The industry contributes a big portion of tax revenue for the entire nation. So it is comparable to nations made wealthy by resource extraction but has degrees of freedom in the markets those directly tied to market prices do not.
The second question to ask is what is the wealth inequality gap between nations. Both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia score very high on the comparison but have vastly different systems in regards to diversity of industries.
The third question to ask is what are the minimum standards of living in a nation and how will it make people live below that. While this measure is aspirational as a quantum of policy, it has a direct bearing upon what will be accepted by a nation. This element can be considered by comparing how differently the question is considered amongst the nations with the highest degree of inequality.

There are many other aspects to explore but I have developed a three body problem and Newton showed that was usually enough to confound us all.

City of God? Where is that? Jerusalem, Rome, someone's imagination? Like really who has been to the City of God and how do we know about it? How is it different from the good life people get to enter if their hearts weigh right when they are judged by Isis of Oris? — Athena

Are you asking those questions for purely rhetorical purposes or are you genuinely curious?

So far in this discussion, I have not opposed your thesis but only remarked upon where your observations did not satisfy my understanding of matters. That does not mean I am representing Torquemada or apologizing for the sins of an institution. You said something was easy-peasy for Christians. It isn't for all of them.

Your breakdown of how the various Hellenistic communities understood what happened is helpful. Your previous explanations of this history puts the events in the context of the people where it is happening.

One aspect that has long pestered me is that so much of the language appears in so many different ways but keeps repeating in one form or another at the same (or other) time.

It is a collection of ideas but also something else.

I appreciate you bringing up different ways to help. It is a difficult topic to discuss because what could be more ripe for one's own bullshit than to talk about getting past it.

I have encountered a number of helpers and was helped by most of them blowing me off. Some portion of that was insight and some portion was force protection. If one embraces the self-knowledge model, expect unwanted results. We attract certain elements and learn or not from the arrival.

So, other people have problems I don't. But my problems are connected to theirs. The diagnostic approach is important. Is the model based upon relative levels of wellness or degrees of infection?

Both measures suck in critical ways.

Perhaps one part of the question of what to make of the ruler is in verse 89:

Jesus said: "Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don't you understand that the one who made the inside also made the outside?" — Miller/Funk Collection

In the other Gospels, the reference to the cup is presented more as a charge of hypocrisy. Such as Luke 11:39:

You Pharisees clean the outside of cups and dishes but inside you are full of greed and evil. Did not the one who made the outside make the inside? Still, donate everything inside to charity, and then you will see how everything will become clean for you. — Miller/Funk Collection

The Thomas version is more of an actual challenge than the judgement meted out in Luke. The Kingdom has a shape where both the outside and the inside are created.

One way to think about is through the work of theater. It takes a lot of work to put on a show. If you know that you are not doing anything toward that end, some other actors must be involved.
Therefore, QED.

Understood. I will take a few days to ponder the parts of the text I have in mind before opining something.

One of the windows is how sexuality is referred to as not being important in some passages while others call for everyone to be "male."
It sounds like a local difficulty being related to a universal one.

I remember that time (being kind of old) but let us take up the topic as well (or as poorly) as we can in the present moment with whatever resources that are available to us now.

Nothing you won't find in Elaine Pagels' famous book (The Gnositc Gospels). — Tom Storm

That work is a good element to bring into the discussion. While noting the difficulties of confirming texts that so much energy went into erasing from history, Pagels also presented a defense of Pauline Christianity in the face of the new information. It was her dime and I appreciate the argument. But I wouldn't hire her for the best advocate to present a different view.

I really like the advent calendar approach. One doesn't have to understand the whole world by looking out of a particular window.

The biggest departure of this Gospel from the others is a matter of timing. We are in the changed place rather than waiting for it to be changed. So I am not sure if the comparison with "outside of time" hits the mark.

Are you "attracted" to this material?

One of the interesting qualities of the Gospel of Thomas is how the language is very close to the received canon of the Church Fathers. So the "esoteric" messages are important but there is also a down to earth quality in the words to be observed. Consider the 6th verse:

His disciples asked him and said to him, "Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we give to charity? What diet should we observe?"
Jesus said, "Don't lie, and don't do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven. After all, there is nothing hidden that won't be revealed, and there is nothing covered up that will remain undisclosed." — From Robert Miller

(translation appears to be a group work product)

I brought up the matter of taking responsibility as an objection to your statement: "That is, unlike Christians believing we must be saved by a supernatural power, our development is a matter of our own effort."

However one considers debates over being saved by works or faith, the command to love your neighbor as yourself requires that one become such a lover. While there are sharp disagreements amongst Christians, they all accept that the one who obeys the command will have to struggle and suffer for having done so.

Running through the many ways this effort is expressed is that one is revealed and witnessed as a result. There is no place to hide if one bears witness to themselves. The City of God compares the City of Men on the basis of this visibility. By their fruits you shall know them. The Imitation of Christ is a very personal devotion I cannot characterize. But it asks for a lot. Written as a Catholic reflection, it can be heard echoed in Kierkegaard's Works of Love.

Great observations.
In regards to the Critique of Judgement, I still wonder like I did when first encountered: "who is this person and what is he saying?"

That is, unlike Christians believing we must be saved by a supernatural power, our development is a matter of our own effort. — Athena

Many criticisms of Christians are framed as putting too much responsibility upon individuals for their choices. Your description does not account for the thought in the City of God or the Imitation of Christ.

It might be helpful to consider Plotinus as a self-identified follower of Plato who disagreed with his Stoic contemporaries. I would like to draw more lines from actual texts but that is an academic endeavor I cannot take on at the moment. Consider the following paragraph from SEP:

The second group of major opponents of Platonism were the Stoics. The Enneads are filled with anti-Stoic polemics. These polemics focus principally on Stoic materialism, which Plotinus finds to be incapable of articulating an ontology which includes everything in the universe. More important, Stoic materialism is unable to provide explanatory adequacy even in the realm in which the Stoics felt most confident, namely, the physical universe. For example, the Stoics, owing to their materialism, could not explain consciousness or intentionality, neither of which are plausibly accounted for in materialistic terms. According to Plotinus, the Stoics were also unable to give a justification for their ethical position – not in itself too far distant from Plato’s – since their exhortations to the rational life could not coherently explain how one body (the empirical self) was supposed to identify with another body (the ideal rational agent).

I disagree.
What was done by removing our enemies requires something else. That is the central thesis in Plato's Republic.

Maybe not so much.

The charge was brought forward as corrupting youths. And he more or less accepted that he was guilty as charged. A struggle between generations, if you will.

When the natural goodness of man fails, written codes of morality will flourish, When written codes of morality fail, Laws and Lawyers will flourish. — Ken Edwards

As it is represented in the text, none of those outcomes are necessary. Observing the progression is to suggest another movement is possible.

Otherwise, why bother? Who wants the inevitability of their futility described in excruciating detail?

Thank you for considering the passage. I think the latter parts of the Ethics address the William James perspective more directly than the first parts.

I am leery of viewing traditions of thought as systems that complete the expression of specific concepts. Taken to a certain point, that would be to say there is only one concept that can translate all others.

In regards to Spinoza, I find the consideration of his work as a conversation with Maimonides to be illuminating. Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish community but he did not expel them from his. He was also keen in his opposition to the religious wars raging amongst his Christian contemporaries.

I understand your request. Maybe there is something in the Unicode that does that.
But I doubt it, for reasons already offered.

Set theory may have something like what you are looking for. But logic uses the Aristotelian either/or.
Maybe you could say more about what you are looking for.

Reading Zhuangzi, the release from duality is becoming more circumspect about saying what essence may be of anything. And thus all the jokes told to signal all the effort to point this out breaks the rule they seek to establish.

From where I stand he didn't, he just dodged the question of the meaninglessness of existence and says we should revolt instead of suicide. — Darkneos

Camus objected to Sartre, not by disagreeing that "Existentialism" is what happens when the grounds for one's being has to be discovered in the context of experience, but that such a realization gave one a key to the rest of the world.

Maybe this observation belongs on a more Spinoza specific thread but the determinism relates to how something is either caused by itself or by something not itself. That is quite different from viewing the matter as whether one can insert a cause between other causes. The point of "God" not being able to do it is pointing to a structural problem with the question more than offering an opinion about what is possible.

My intention is to discuss ideas. People need to help themselves. — synthesis

Yes, the actual work is where the rubber meets the road.
In the Taoist practices (which I am more familiar with than the Zen), that element is strongly emphasized but also is in a complicated dialogue with ethics that want to define obligations and values in unambiguous statements. Accepting uncertainty does not locate oneself in a map of certainty.

But I take the point that the "intellectual" is not self sufficient.

Spinoza's argument against free will was not to say there was nothing to be done about changing one's experience and of those around you. Consider the following proposition:

Proposition 20:
This love for God cannot be tainted by emotions either of envy or jealousy, but the more people we imagine to be joined with God in the same bond of love, the more it is ​fostered.
Proof:
This love for God is the highest good ​that we can seek by the dictate of reason (by 4p28). It is common to all human beings (by 4p36), and we desire everyone to enjoy it (by 4p37). Therefore (by DOE23) it cannot ​be tainted by the emotion of envy ​nor (by 5p18 and by the definition of jealousy, ​for which see 3p35s) by the emotion of jealousy either. To the contrary (by 3p31) the more people we imagine to enjoy it, the more it must be fostered. Q. E. D.
Scholium:
We can in this same way show that there is no emotion that is directly contrary to this love by which this love can be destroyed; and therefore we can conclude that this love for God is the most constant of all emotions, and cannot be destroyed, insofar as it is related to the body, except with the body itself. We shall see later what nature it has, insofar as it is related to the mind alone. ​With this I have covered all the remedies for the emotions, or everything that the mind, considered in itself, can do in the face of the emotions. It is clear from all this that the power of the mind over the emotions consists:

First, in cognition of the emotions itself (see 5p4s).
Secondly, in the fact that it separates the emotions from the thought of an external cause which we imagine in a confused way (see 5p2 with the same 5p4s).
Thirdly, in the time, by which the affections related to things that we understand surpass those which are related to things that we conceive in a confused or mutilated fashion (see 5p7).
Fourthly, in the very many causes which foster the affections related to the common properties of things or to God (see 5p9 and 5p11).
Fifthly and finally, in the order by which the mind is able to order and connect its emotions with each other (see 5p10s as well as 5p12, 5p13 and 5p14).

But in order that this power of the mind ​over the emotions may be better understood, the first thing to note is that we call emotions great when we compare one person’s emotion with another’s and see that one person is assailed by a particular emotion more than someone else, or when we compare one and the same person’s emotions with each other and find that the same person is affected or moved by one emotion more than by another. For (by 4p5) the force of each emotion is defined by the power of the external cause compared with our own. The power ​of the mind however is defined by cognition alone, ​whereas its powerlessness, ​or passion, is estimated solely by privation of cognition, i.e. by that through which ideas are said to be inadequate. It follows from this that a mind is most acted on when inadequate ideas constitute its greatest part, so that it is distinguished more by being acted on than by acting. Conversely a mind acts the most when adequate ideas constitute its greatest part, so that, although there are as many inadequate ideas in the latter as in the former, it is still distinguished more by ideas that are related to human virtue than those that betray human powerlessness. Then, we should note that sicknesses ​of the spirit and misfortune mostly have their origin in an excessive love for something that is subject to many changes and that we can never control. For no one is anxious or worried about anything but what he loves; and offense, suspicion, enmity, etc. arise only from a love for things which no one can in truth possess. We easily conceive from this therefore what clear and distinct cognition can do in the face of the emotions, especially the third kind of cognition (on which see 2p47s) whose foundation is the very cognition of God. That is, insofar as they are passions, if it does not absolutely take them away (see 5p3 with 5p4s), it at least ensures that they make up a very small part of the mind (see 5p14). Then, it generates love for an unchangeable and eternal thing (see 5p15) which we in truth possess (see 2p45) and which for that reason is tainted by none of the faults that there are in ordinary love, but can always be greater and greater (by 5p15) and occupy the greatest part of the mind (by 5p16) and have broad effects upon it. And with this I have dealt with everything that concerns this present life. As I said at the beginning of this scholium, anyone will easily be able to see that in these few words I have covered all the remedies for the emotions, if he has paid attention to what we have said in this scholium and at the same time to the definitions of the mind and its emotions and finally to 3p1 and 3p3. It is now time therefore to move on to things that pertain to the duration of the mind without relation to the body.

Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) (p. 231 -236). Cambridge University Press. Part 5, Power of the Intellect, or Of Human Freedom — Spinoza

That is well said.
Much to think about.