Nihilism and Psychological Relativism

I'm not sure about the title of this one. It sounds a little pretentious, but the title "Nihilism" didn't quite seem complete. I hope it's not too misleading. Without futher adieu:

I was having an excellent conversation with Leeor, and as usual we hit on some philosophical issue. Actually, we were having a perfectly average conversation when we started to overanalyze and have a lot of fun doing so. Essentially we were dissecting how people of varying religious beliefs can have faith in things which may or may not make logical sense to the outsider. In the end, I believe that our conversation concluded with a stunningly good demonstration of why nihilism is the closest that one can get to "truth"; i.e. the truth is that there is no truth.

Let's begin by taking the case of two people by using religion to demonstrate this point. One person is a very devout Christian of some kind. The other is an atheist with absolutely no conscious spiritualism. It is very obvious that each person believes that their dogma represents the cosmic truth (if you will). The Christian may have no idea whatsoever of how the atheist can believe what he does and vice-versa. The atheist may say, how can there be a god if you have no tangible proof of one, let alone the one that you proclaim exists. The Christian would respond by saying, how could there not be a god, especially when your beliefs can provide no reckoning of why anything really exists (and if the atheist was a physicist they'd start spewing some mumbo-jumbo about how the reason the universe exists is because if it didn't then we wouln't be here to see if, which I hate because it attempts to redefine the word "why"); hence, you can't prove what I'm saying is wrong so why should it be wrong. In essence, each person is right in their own mind. It would also be impossible for each person to prove the other wrong because each person's notion of what it takes to be proven right or wrong is different. Therefore it stands to reason that either both people are right, or both people are wrong. Since each person is clearly correct in their own mind, then we can safely say that both people are right. This raises the concern that both of our people are correct, yet their beliefs are contradictory and mutually exclusive. Here is where the basis of nihilism and relativism are proven. The obvious answer for our dilemma is that both people have different standards or requirements for proving the truth, and that leads them to different conclusions of what this truth really is. These standards are whimsical among individuals, much like a preference for a particular food. Each individual in this scenario clearly has everything they require to come to their conclusion, and yet their conclusions are so very different. Because of this we can say absolutely nothing for certain. A blind person could say that there was no such thing as light, and they would be right because to them there really isn't light. This is like the whole quantum mechanics, dead cat in a box thing, except that it goes further. People who like to say that there are such things as absolutes like to point to things like math, which are supposedly absolute because they are not prone to interperatation, but are rather highly logical and deterministic abstractions of the human mind. There are two responses to this. 1) Just look at 1984. If you tell people that 2 + 2 = 5, and give them no other alternative to believe anything else, then they will believe it. Math is only deterministic because we have created generally accepted rules that allow it to function as such. There's no fundamental reason why it isn't or couldn't be as chaotic as the rest of the world. And 2) Logic is entirely relative, so "logical reasoning" in math isn't any different that any other reasoning. Look back to the example of the two people. To the religious person, it was entirely logical to come to the conclusion that there was this one specific god. Logic is merely a person's intuition of what the most sensible pattern of reasoning is. It too is subject to these standards by which people decide what is true or correct.

Many people find this kind of thinking highly dangerous, and rightfully so. It comes to no other conclusion than that there are no universal truths besides the fact that there are no universal truths (and even that is very questionable). That is nihilism in a nutshell: what people need to believe that something is true varies from individual to individual, and because there are all these conflicting standards, there is no one universal standard for anything, and consequently nothing is certain; i.e. the eternal verity is that there are no eternal verities. You know what's great about this though? That statement that I just made which I've repeated at least thrice is totally contradictory... have fun with that.