The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable

In his book Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them), Bart Erhman describes a technique called horizontal analysis. You take a number of sources, such as the synoptic Gospels, and compare how they describe the event - the Jesus' birth, the Passion of Christ, or Jesus' Baptism.
Erhman uses this technique in his New Testament 101 to show his students how the gospels differ in often significant and irreconcilable ways. It's an important methodology that shows how our understanding of the Christian message has been conflated, confused, and outright fabricated. Most folks who read the Bible find, in individual passages, words of hope and comfort. Taken as a whole, however, the Bible can be disorienting.
And, just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, a similar reading of two popular and familar tales brings a similar dis-ease:

via Cycnical-C Blog to Unreasonable Faith