Leviticus 19:28 tells us not to have tattoos. In order to determine if this applies today, we need understand why this was commanded and if this reasoning still applies today. So let's consider this commandment in context:
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You are not to eat anything with blood in it. You are not to practice divination or sorcery. You are not to cut off the hair at the sides of your head or mar the edge of your beard. You are not to make gashes on your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves; I am Yehovah.
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Leviticus 19:26-28
Here we see a list of prohibitions. What do they have in common? All of the things prohibited were common customs of the neighboring corrupt peoples/tribes. There is nothing obviously sinful about cutting off the hair at the sides of your head. But at a time when sinful cultures did this, if you also did this then you would be identifying with sinful culture which isn't a good thing. So God had a good reason for these commands at that time. Cutting off the hair at the sides of your head, marring the edge of your beard, and making gashes on your bodies for the dead are no longer associated with sinful cultures, so the reasoning no longer applies. But what about tattoo marks? Just looking at the world around me, I conclude that tattoo marks are associated with the sinful modern liberal culture of our time. So here the logic still seems to apply.
There is
a fascinating museum in Xalapa, Mexico that contains artifacts of the various people who lived in the area. What makes it fascinating is that it is all organized in one long hall where everything is sorted chronologically. So by walking down the hall through the museum, you are walking through time. You can watch how the style of each culture changes as the culture rises and falls. As each culture rises, you see more and more accurate portrayals of the natural human form. And as each culture falls, it begins to distort the natural human forum in many ways including images on the body, various piercings and body rings, and other grotesque things. I believe this can be explained with the principles that I discussed in
Human Evolution. These distortions were probably signs of immorality used by men to attract women who naturally prefer immoral men in a promiscuous culture. In particular, tattoos are only found historically in primitive cultures and declining culture, which again makes sense if tattoos are a sign of immorality.
In our culture, tattoos were socially unacceptable until quite recently. In the past, only outlaw types got tattoos which showed a kind of immoral daring. In these immoral days,
40% of Americans ages 26 to 40 have a tattoo. This increase in tattoo usage perfectly matches the decline of modern culture. In this case, I think the tattoo is an effect, not a cause. But the key point here is that the reason that God prohibited tattoos in Leviticus applies just as much today as it did then. If you have a tattoo, you are publicly announcing that you are part of a sinful culture.
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