The sola scriptura OT church

[The Mikado]

How about contrasting Ezra's and Nehemiah's responses to mixed marriages?  Ezra kicked the offending spouses and offspring out of the community, Nehemiah merely grandfathered in the preexisting mixed marriages and banned new ones.

[The Mikado]

Redalgo: get lost in Brooklyn sometime and you'll quickly find the answers you seek.

[The Mikado]

lol

I'm not really joking.  You can find tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews who do this s**t every day, from not using electricity and toilet paper on Saturday to not drinking tap water because some of the microbial life in it is vaguely, in some sense, shellfish.

Oh, yeah, and as to the "not approaching the altar of the Lord if you have physical defects" thing, a nice demonstration of that in practice is given by Josephus, who tells of how Herod the Great had the heirs of the Hasmonean family blinded and had their ears cut off in order to make them physically deformed and permanently ineligible for the priesthood so they wouldn't be able to threaten his rule any more. 

[The Mikado]

But, yeah, Judaism (and Christianity, though the answers are mostly different) has answers to a lot of the silly stuff like that old chain email.  I'm not a believer, but I find it a bit frustrating when people who clearly don't even really understand the basics of how Judaism/Christianity work string together a bunch of Bible verses and go, "What do you think about this?" 

For example, that mention of a bull sacrifice.  Judaism firmly established the doctrine that animals can only be sacrificed at the Temple at Jerusalem.  Said Temple no longer exists.  Rabbinical Judaism dictates that the prayer liturgy takes the place of the sacrifice in the Atonement and worship cycle (at least until/unless the Temple is ever rebuilt).  Similarly, this is the same reason why Judaism abandoned priests: they're intimately connected with the Temple ritual: should the Temple be reestablished, the Jews will bring back the kohanim.  Christianity never did animal sacrifice because Jesus took the place of the sacrifices: his body is the scapegoat, there is no need for animal sacrifices.

[The Mikado]

Redalgo, if you want a "fun" introduction to some of these issues, I'd recommend A. J. Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible As Literally As Possible.  Jacobs, a lapsed Jew, is a secular guy and more than a bit irreverent (especially towards the beginning of the book), but by the end of his project he ends up finding worth in a lot of the ritual of the OT and ends up continuing to keep the Sabbath, saying prayers of thanksgiving before meals, etc.  

Amusingly enough, Jacobs, being a germophobe, adores the rule that he can't touch menstruating women.  He celebrates having an excuse not to have to shake hands or hug half of the human race and wishes he could find a similar Biblical excuse not to touch men either.

EDIT:  At various points, Jacobs does experiment with stuff that's reminiscent of that email up there.  He goes a week without mentioning the days of the week or the names of the planets due to the Biblical injunction not to let the names of false gods pass your lips.  He gives that one up, of course.  But there's plenty of more serious passages where he really does end up getting something out of what he's doing...mostly in passages where he's joining movements in their rituals.  Like the bit where he gets rip-roaringly drunk with a bunch of elderly Lubavitchers on Purim (Purim is basically Judaism's answer to Mardi Gras).  He argues pretty persuasively that a lot of people have the incredibly false opinion that all religion is anti-booze, and that partying with a bunch of ultra-Orthodox Jews will disavow you of that pretty quickly.

[The Mikado]

Ernest, I don't see how Jesus' rejection of the teachings of the Samaritans can even be called into doubt, given Jesus' visitation to the Temple of Jerusalem and making it clear that he thought the Temple was his Father's house, not Mt. Gezrim.  If he bought the Samaritan message, wouldn't he have tried to purify and cleanse his Father's house up on top of the mountain?

Furthermore, the Samaritans, while sola scriptura, only believed in a Bible that contained the Pentateuch alone, while Jesus etc. refer to the Prophets and the Writings extensively.