They have been fighting for over 1300 years.
It’s about time they get over themselves, no?
Is there anything that can be done about this issue?
The same thing that works with Catholics and Protestants; have them take their religion less seriously.
I have a radical idea that just might work.
I think the US government, and all friendly governments and allies, should just pick one side and declare it correct, and say the other side is wrong. We don’t need proof or logic, not like their conflict is rational anyways.
People have been fighting about lots of things for several thousand years longer than that. What’s special about the Sunni-Shiite split?
Catholics and Protestants started taking their religion less seriously at the Peace of Westphalia? Seriously?
What makes you think “their conflict” is somehow not “rational” as compared to the conflict between different ethnic groups in other countries?
I’ve never heard anyone proposing that the solution to South Africa would be for the powers of the world to arbitrarily declare either “black South Africans” or “Afrikaners” to be “the winner” and then that be that.
Similarly, I never heard anyone make such an argument regarding the conflict between the Croatians, Serbians and Bosnian Muslims of the late 1990s.
I could understand if the conflict was over different interpretations of theology, but it’s not.
Would WWII not have happened if the British and the Germans “taken their religion less seriously”?
Catholics and Protestants stopped fighting then? They most certainly didn’t.
Never said anything about other conflicts
They most certainly did stop having conflicts that could in any way be explained by their religious differences.
ETA: I don’t mean to suggest that Sunni and Shiites are massively different from Catholics and Protestants in that regard — as Ibn Warraq points out, the difference between the two is essentially the same as an ethnic signifier.
They did no such thing. The only religious difference necessary to create conflict has been that one group is called Catholic, and the other Protestant. And that’s not even counting all the various bizarre accusations they’ve made up about each other over the centuries to demonize each other. My Irish aunt used to tell stories of all the accusations they hurled at each other (the only time I hear an Irish accent from her is if she imitates her childhood self by reciting the words “Dirty Protestant!”)
I’m sure we’ve gone over this on the Dope a few hundred times by now, but given how many of the people pushing for Irish independence were actively irreligious, how few (possibly none whatsoever, but I’m no Irish historian) of the disputes between the parties were about their religious differences, and that the origins of the conflict between Ireland and England predates the Reformation by a healthy margin, describing the conflict in Ireland as a religious conflict is just silly. And in fact, elsewhere in Europe the boundaries between Protestant and Catholic did not see any exceptional levels of civil conflict.
…which, by the way, is completely a propos to the OP, because roughly the same observation applies to Sunni and Shiite. In a given country, the disputes between the two groups that give rise to conflict often have nothing whatsoever to do with their religious difference.
It certainly was in part. And the problem is all over not just in Ireland; there’s been plenty of Catholic/Protestant conflict here in America too for example.
Put the Jews in control (for real, I mean). They’ll fix it.
The conflict in Northern Ireland is no more a religious conflict than the fighting between the Kurds and the Turks or the Croatians and the Serbians.
There has been?
Define conflict and tell me when there’s been Catholics slaughtering Protestants in the US or vice versa without going back two centuries.
I know, but you claimed that it would be best if world leaders looked over the situation and arbitrarily decided who the victor was.
Presumably you feel the same about the conflict between the Bosnian Muslims and the Serbs and the Afrikaners and South African blacks.
If you feel otherwise perhaps you could enlighten us by explaining why you have such intellectually inconsistent views.
Really, that’s the only difference?
One side being the indigenous population while the other side being the descendants of settlers wasn’t necessary for the conflict.
With all due respect, you clearly know nothing of the conflict.
Next you’re going to argue that the only reason Koreans and Japanese hate each other is because most Koreans are Protestants while most Japanese aren’t.
Ibn Warraq’s right. Most tension in the United States between Catholics and Protestants has usually actually been based on ethnicity.
In the early days, the Protestants were the English and the Catholics were the French or Spanish. In later times, the Protestants were the established Americans and the Catholics were the immigrants from Ireland or Italy or Poland or Mexico.
We just need an international injunction on all religious leadership. All preachers, mullahs, bishops, rabbis, lamas, etc must be imprisoned. Let Rick Warren share a cell with Ali Khamenei, with no opportunity to issue public statements or private directives. People should have the basic right to practice any given religion, but not to use it in any other way.
And all those religious structures would convert nicely to homeless shelters.
Well you would presume wrong 
The topic was to address solutions. I make no claim that mine is the best solution, or the fastest. It is simply A solution. One that, I think, hasn’t been tried before by the US and would be fun to see what happens
That’s how it is between Sunnis and Shi’ites. After enough generations, a religious identity can become an ethnic identity.