God is so quiet

[Fake Messiah]

Your problem continues to be that the pronoun 'nothing' means the negation of the word it is referring to!!

You had nothing for lunch. That means lunch did not happen. 

You saw nobody. Means that seeing a person did not happen.

None of the people ate to cookie. Means that eating did not happen. 

Nothing existing. Means that existing did not happen. 

So no, it does not look to be a logical contradiction--in the slightest. You MUST have tried to look this up. Didn't the fact that you couldn't find anything give you pause?

It is a logical contradiction, but I was missing some intermediate steps there to get to that conclusion.

The negation of everything in existence still requires something to exist for such a state of affairs to be possible. And in fact, the negation itself must be expressed as a possible world/state, one that has to be "concrete" in order to be possibly actual. But we can't speak of something like that as true "nothingness". And so "nothing exists" does translate to "nothing is something" and, therefore, is illogical.

This nonsense that SteveII is trying to pull reminds me of a story that happened to Isaac Asimov. For some reason he decided to try to attend sociology class although he was never impressed by the soft sciences. There the sociology professor made a table on the board in which he divided people into rationalists and mystics. Under mystics he had listed mathematicians.

So Asimov asked him why did he list mathematicians as mystics and the professor told him it was because they believe in the reality of the square root of minus one. Then Asimov told him that the square root of minus one is perfectly real to which professor told him to hand him square root of minus one piece of chalk. Whereupon Asimov tried to explain him that cardinal numbers are used for counting and the so-called imaginary numbers like the square root of minus one, have other functions.

And indeed suppose you represent the real number system on a straight line with 0 (zero) in the center. The positive numbers are on one side of the zero and the negative numbers are on the other. You can then represent the imaginary system of numbers along another line, crossing the first at right angles at the zero point, with the positive imaginaries on one side of the zero and the negative imaginaries on the other. Numbers can be located anywhere in the plane by using both kinds together: (+2) + ( + 3i) or ( + 3) + (-2i). These are "complex numbers."
Mathematicians and physicists find it very useful to be able to associate all the points in a plane with a number system. They couldn't do without the so-called imaginary numbers.