Ah well technical nihilism started ages ago, sure, but I doubt it was cemented or well known in the minds of the everyday person until evolution came around. Without Darwinism and the rise of atheism, I don't think nihilism would have gained ground in the mind of the everyday like today. Atheism generally is a prerequisite for nihilism, after all.
No it isn't.
What is nihilism? It is a negation of one, multiple or all aspects of existence, including values, materiality, knowledge, purpose among others.
It cannot be denied that christian crusaders were nihilists, in how they threw away their comfort or life to assault the holy sites, the
children's crusade or poor's crusade (sending beggars, sick and outcasts) is a prime example of religious nihilist idiocy. The artists of the medieval period didn't sign their works adhering to the rule of "ad maiorem dei gloriam" (meaning, for the greater glory of god), there are many examples of human beings either being convinced, readily believing or being forced to reject aspects of their existence in order to obey religious texts, leaders or societies at large. This too is nihilism.
Hmm no the problem I see with humanism is that there is no objective basis in which you follow your ethical code. It's by the use of traditional ontologies that we arrived to our current level of morality and ethics. If one forgoes that, I feel, in the future we're going to have difficulties in deciding what's good for ourselves.
Creating objective foundations on falsities or arbitrary decisions is a big lie. I'd rather seek for objective knowledge to base my actions on and rely on my personal ethics that I fully realise are only mine, that is, I won't ever accuse someone else of not doing exactly the same, because I have no basis to do it.
And finding a quick fix moral basis such as unprovable god or something else doesn't cut it for me. I'd rather live my life, knowing I believe in some incomplete theory that will someday be improved or rendered obsolete, than defend an oblivious generalisation.
I have even more respect for people who admit they believe in fantasies and choose to do it based on their personal aesthetics and freedom of choice.
Again, in the bigger scheme of things, we may have to sympathize with people like Nixon or the Japanese Imperial emperor if we were humanistic. If you take the humanist route, you're bound to turn Machiavellian. Morality becomes a powergame rather than morality for its own sake.
How? Why? Again, arrogance, explain why would it happen?
If anything, Machiavellian is imposing rules on a society, claiming them universal and then remaining above the hierarchy of common folk, just like the aristocracy and clergy used to and still do in a different way to a different extent. This is a power game, the hierarchy under the subterfuge of equality and totality of arbitrary rules.
edit: I don't see it going anywhere, I asked you to back what you say up previously and all you could do was say we have different world-views. I won't bother to reply to another set of baseless claims or ideas.